[flopto]

1. Able. Not that skin color itself affects any sort of intellectual ability, but race--including, importantly, the experiences people have because of their skin color--definitely impacts who you are and what you are good at.

2. White software engineers are better at designing racist software (mostly joking). Another half joke: white people are better at designing technology that gets taken seriously by the government and the public (i.e. their technology will be taken more seriously because they are white, not any special ability there). But seriously, white engineers would probably be better at designing technology for teaching other white people about race.

3. Yes, there are absolutely some parts of designing medical software that engineers who have battled cancer would be better at. Imagine you are making one of those medical devices that sits next to a cancer patient's bed post-chemo and shows a bunch of numbers. Now if you fought cancer, you've probably had lots of experience lying in that bed next to those screens, and you could have a much better intuition about how those screens should look and how they should present their visualizations in ways that make a patient more confident. Or imagine the software engineer wants to, you know, talk with some patients or doctors to understand what to make: the engineer who battled cancer will probably be much better understanding what the patients (and doctors) want.

[JoeAltmaier]

I don't know the race of any software engineers I haven't met. Which is almost all of them. How could govt and the public know either? It seems strange to imagine it could matter.

[flopto]

Well, there are the famous ones. I'd bet facebook would have been treated differently if Mark Zuckerberg were black. You also probably automatically make guesses about people's race online. Race is a bit trickier, but it's not too hard to guess gender online (usernames, and things like this thing I just found on google: http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze)