[yaketysax]

"If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population"

It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product. So what's the point in having diversity at every level?

"and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs,"

no.

"or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies."

nope

[groby_b]

> It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product.

It is, if you work at a company that values your input. (As Google does). The point is not that everybody gives input all the time - the point is that if something goes wrong that affects subgroup ${X}, there's a member from that subgroup who can speak out and provide feedback.

That doesn't work if you're in a company that believes in centralized control and top-down management. Google is not that company :)

And yes, if you disagree with that approach because you want top-down, you do believe there's a certain group that's better suited to make all decisions - they're the managers.

[dragonwriter]

> It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product.

Whether that's true or not really depends on the organizational structure and management philosophy of the company. From everything I've read, role differentiation of the specific type that would make that true is less true, at least within the broad umbrella of "technical staff", is not particularly prominent at Google.