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by i_am_new_here 1789 days ago
I don't see why Japanese men shouldn't be up to the job compared to the groups you listed with their obvious downsides:

younger - lack of experience

female - women to the rescue

international - lack exposure to local customs

"Fresh perspective" / "leaders in the decision making process" (leadership positions) - Hacker News agrees that "it's all about execution" and that "adding more ideas/perspectives" as you suggest here might be rather counterproductive or at least not a benefit.

It's software engineers that get payed a multiple of other (regular) jobs in silicon valley, which sets SV apart from the rest of the world.

People arguing like you are either young, not-male and/or not-native and want one of the financially attractive leadership positions for the money. They don't want or promote diversity anywhere else but in this limited area (leadership positions), which just quickly exposes their true underlying motivation: Hypocrisy and your own greed.

1 comments

That's your personal interpretation, and in my opinion it's quite revealing.

It should go without saying, but I guess it needs to be explicitly stated here: it's good to have -qualified-, diverse candidates in leadership roles. Obviously just putting some underqualified person isn't going to work out and it's a bit tautological to state this. There's nothing about "young" that automatically means "lack of experience", or "old" that automatically means "experienced". There's nothing about "more diverse candidates" that means "not qualified"- that's your personal interpretation. It doesn't mean "more qualified" either.

Leadership (and really, all company roles) benefit from having different perspectives. When your perspective is from generally one group it's easy to be out of touch and just start missing the mark.

> Obviously just putting some underqualified person isn't going to work out and it's a bit tautological to state this.

You have nothing to add to my reply so you reply with a tautology and to your own defense you point it out yourself ?!

Diverse often means to accept less qualification for the sake of accomplishing diversity, unfortunately.

It's not the perspectives that matter, its execution. Did you understand this?

"You have nothing to add to my reply"

Please re-read the rest of my reply.

"Diverse often means to accept less qualification for the sake of accomplishing diversity, unfortunately."

This is your opinion. It's not factual, and I'm pointing this out. There is nothing intrinsic about being more diverse that makes it lower quality or less able "to execute" than a monoculture. There is nothing about monocultures that means they are more, or less, capable "to execute" in the first place... a lot of them are just buddies hiring buddies. It's your assumption in the first place that these are efficient or meritocratic in the first place. They can be. Many businesses aren't even efficient or good at executing.

"It's not the perspectives that matter, its execution."

...perspectives are what influence execution in the first place. You need to be able to execute a plan well, but creating a good plan is also vital. Diverse perspectives catch potential design flaws and other things that can be missed by having a monoculture (any monoculture) in leadership.

I find it discriminating of you that you distrust any ones ability to do the job. In Japan there are Japanese people. Who should do the job? They of course, why not, they live there. Why shouldn't "some of them" create enough diverse views? What do you want? That people from other countries go to Japan and enrich them? Gentrify and replace them? Will they have/add better perspectives? Will they mix or integrate into the local population while providing more diverse views and creating a more diverse population (also: physically - like "mixed ethnicity babies")?