For certain classes of problem having some amount of diversity when developing a solution can provide some variation in test inputs if the requirements aren't fully understood. For example, if you are developing a speech recognition system, having developers with different accents can help the system deal with those different accents early in the development cycle instead of later in the testing cycle.
There is also something to be said about different people having different thought processes for approaching a given problem, though that isn't guaranteed just by virtue of their skin color or genitals.
That said, if you are aware that these sorts of problems exist you can plan your development/test cycle without needing diversity in your engineers. In my example you could solve the problem by having non-engineers with different accents provide sample audio of themselves speaking. The benefit of this approach is that it is more reproducible and allows for a consistent test suite as you make changes/improvements. The risk is you don't always know the full scope of these sorts or problems/variations early in the development cycle, and they may be costly to address later on.
Personally I wouldn't go out of my way to make a "diverse" team of engineers to mitigate that type of problem. I'd rather have a non-diverse team of competent engineers I could trust to ensure the requirements were as comprehensive as possible and minimize the number of "hidden" requirements to be discovered as development progressed.
People don't have different thought processes, especially not as a function of race. What some people have are non-normal perspectives, however those people are nearly always either very very stupid or very very smart. Hence non-normal. Human beings nearly all think and solve problems similarly--it's part of what makes us all the same species. Our cognitive algorithms are basically pre-programmed.
For example: Cats don't push. Really--watch how cats play and interact with objects. Cats can scoop and pull. However, do not push. Even the typical "Cat Pat" is just the first stage of a scoop or a gentle smack.
Humans similar in that we have particular thinking and problem solving aparati that are literally baked into our hardware. Anybody who tells you that a black woman has a different way of problems solving is lying. She doesn't. She's human like the rest of us. A man from Sudan will jury rig the same solutions to his problems as a man from Bolivia if he is given the same tools or is in the same environment.
I'll agree that there's a degree of genetics at play, but I'm a strong supporter of the idea that culture drives a large portion of behavior. Have you seen what passes for black culture in the U.S.? Awful stuff, I can't imagine the state of my mind if I had been raised on that. One could argue that only a lost cause would willingly remain under the influence of a destructive culture, but I was a kid once and know there's only so much agency you can expect until a certain point in maturity is reached. More simply, no one can be expected to choose a better option unless the subject actually understands that they can choose.
It gets difficult to decipher the cultural influence web when it comes to figuring out why so many whites want to kneel, so I understand that it's an unattractive stance to a lot of people. An oversimplification is that we have multiple cultures at work that support the idea of "the strong must serve the weak".
For certain classes of problem having some amount of diversity when developing a solution can provide some variation in test inputs if the requirements aren't fully understood. For example, if you are developing a speech recognition system, having developers with different accents can help the system deal with those different accents early in the development cycle instead of later in the testing cycle.
There is also something to be said about different people having different thought processes for approaching a given problem, though that isn't guaranteed just by virtue of their skin color or genitals.
That said, if you are aware that these sorts of problems exist you can plan your development/test cycle without needing diversity in your engineers. In my example you could solve the problem by having non-engineers with different accents provide sample audio of themselves speaking. The benefit of this approach is that it is more reproducible and allows for a consistent test suite as you make changes/improvements. The risk is you don't always know the full scope of these sorts or problems/variations early in the development cycle, and they may be costly to address later on.
Personally I wouldn't go out of my way to make a "diverse" team of engineers to mitigate that type of problem. I'd rather have a non-diverse team of competent engineers I could trust to ensure the requirements were as comprehensive as possible and minimize the number of "hidden" requirements to be discovered as development progressed.
People don't have different thought processes, especially not as a function of race. What some people have are non-normal perspectives, however those people are nearly always either very very stupid or very very smart. Hence non-normal. Human beings nearly all think and solve problems similarly--it's part of what makes us all the same species. Our cognitive algorithms are basically pre-programmed.
For example: Cats don't push. Really--watch how cats play and interact with objects. Cats can scoop and pull. However, do not push. Even the typical "Cat Pat" is just the first stage of a scoop or a gentle smack.
Humans similar in that we have particular thinking and problem solving aparati that are literally baked into our hardware. Anybody who tells you that a black woman has a different way of problems solving is lying. She doesn't. She's human like the rest of us. A man from Sudan will jury rig the same solutions to his problems as a man from Bolivia if he is given the same tools or is in the same environment.
I'll agree that there's a degree of genetics at play, but I'm a strong supporter of the idea that culture drives a large portion of behavior. Have you seen what passes for black culture in the U.S.? Awful stuff, I can't imagine the state of my mind if I had been raised on that. One could argue that only a lost cause would willingly remain under the influence of a destructive culture, but I was a kid once and know there's only so much agency you can expect until a certain point in maturity is reached. More simply, no one can be expected to choose a better option unless the subject actually understands that they can choose.
It gets difficult to decipher the cultural influence web when it comes to figuring out why so many whites want to kneel, so I understand that it's an unattractive stance to a lot of people. An oversimplification is that we have multiple cultures at work that support the idea of "the strong must serve the weak".
Solid and sensible answer, thanks.