[yummyfajitas]

My belief is that there probably isn't one. I'm still waiting for someone to provide one.

As a Bayesian, I can certainly tell you how my perspective differs from folks like Leonid Pekelis or Evan Miller. As a person who leans towards parametric statistics and modelling, I can tell you how my perspective differs from the machine learning types.

Why is it so difficult to provide the (alleged) black perspective?

[enumjorge]

I think you're only considering the theoretical/mathematical side of software development. Sure, you can argue (and I would agree) that math is isolated from culture, and as such, a programmer's race can have no impact on how well he or she implements bubble sort.

But software development is not just about CS theory. You're selling a product to people, and thus you introduce the human factor. If say, Facebook one day realizes they need to appeal to female users more to promote growth, does it not make sense that having female team members would be useful? That if Apple sees China as a growth market having Chinese team members will help them better target that userbase?

Obviously, there is no binary tree that is more friendly to the Chinese market, or black, or gay markets etc. But you can definitely change the UI, or messaging, or features that better speak to a specific culture. When architecting a feature in Facebook, a hispanic engineer could suggest a family-focused feature since she knows that family is very important in her culture. That's not to say a white male team of devs couldn't do a great job of satisfying a Hispanic user, but that a more diverse team might do an even better job.

That's a very business-centric take on the issue. Another, more noble side to it is that there's very likely a lot of people from underrepresented minorities who could be high quality software devs but because of their socio-economic status they were discouraged from pursing that career. A more diverse workforce, won't lead to quick results, but it helps.

[yummyfajitas]

The vast majority of developers, even at twitter, are not building user facing frontend features for the consumer market. They are building ETL jobs to shovel data from postgres to vertica, a CRUD app used to track erroneous shipments, or feeding VaR estimates to the SEC. At most you are arguing that product teams at consumer oriented companies need a few token minorities.

But supposing these affinity effects are real, and extend beyond consumer products, then if your customer base doesn't contain these minorities then their presence on your product team might be harmful. I.e., MongoDB or Washington Square Tech should NOT hire a black guy, since a black guy's experience is significantly different from the (white/Asian) rockstar ninjas and banksters making up the customer base. Is this also a conclusion you would endorse?