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"Mind you, I'm just pulling this out of my ass myself, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong. Haven't run across any studies about this sort of thing in my casual perusals of the net, though." Still, this is common enough reasoning put forth to have "diversity" in programmer squads and gatherings. I recall looking at a picture of the Clinton White House staff (I think, or cabinet maybe), where the intent was to show the range of sexes and skin colors. Look, diversity! Yet, as a read the names, I was thinking "lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, not sure, lawyer, lawyer, ..." and wondered where, exactly, was the diversity? What is the argument that a geek with black skin will have different geek ideas to offer than a geek with white or yellow skin? Or that genitalia confers a unique technical point of view? I prefer to be among a technical group where there's a diversity of informed opinion, but I'm skeptical that such diversity has a correlation with sex and race. I'd prefer to hang with a mixed crowd of Lispers, Smalltalkers, PHPers, and embedded system developers, than a Rainbow Collation of nothing-but-Java developers. |