[dcposch]

Hiring a diverse team can be great in lots of ways. Especially for a global product, like many of the ones Google provides, you want a product team that can understand the lived experiences of a rich and varied user base.

Diversity means many things, not just gender and ethnicity. Some of the biggest blind spots I’ve noticed in Silicon Valley companies come from lack of diversity in age and class.

Diversity should be about inclusion, not about exclusion. All people involved in hiring should understand the (common-sense, in my opinion) boundaries set by the Civil Rights Act. Regardless of what you might think when reading certain parts of tumblr or twitter, “only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups” is not forward thinking or progressive. To the extent that it is what it appears to be—slightly coded language for filtering resumes based on gender and race—it’s illegal.

There are so many brilliant people out there, often overlooked. Graduates from un-fancy colleges. Engineers a few years from retirement, but unsatisfied with their current job. A high school contest coder looking for an internship. A person from a poor family who bootstrapped thru community college. To me, diversity is about taking the extra effort to find excellence everywhere, rather than just looking in the default places.