"Hire everyone you know at Stanford." NEAT TRICK. Also "ignore diversity of thought," and apparently diversity of almost everything else. Absolutely stupid.
There is. But racial diversity has nothing to do with it.
The more diverse the backgrounds and thought patterns are of people on a team, the more likely they'll think of and consider solutions and paths that might not have been considered otherwise -- or see pitfalls in them.
If you're building a rocket to go to Mars, you absolutely want as much diversity in your engineering backgrounds as possible (assuming everyone already meets the engineering requirements in the first place).
Have you ever worked with someone that really gets the way you think? It's refreshing. The communication overhead is very low.
It seems I spend a great deal of my time trying to communicate things I already know with people of "diverse" thinking styles.
Don't worry about people being robotic clones of each other. It almost never happens. There is diversity enough without seeking out more blatant diversity.
I've learned an awful lot from people who think very differently than me. They make me reconsider my assumptions and quite often lead to a better solution.
> Is there any value in diversity for its own sake?
I don't know. How would you test that hypothesis?
My unfounded speculation is that, like genetic diversity helps produce a healthy and robust organism, so does diversity of perspective make an organization more fit to respond to a variety of conditions.
That may or may not be of value, depending on the goals of the organization.
A team is more than the sum of the players. An important part of doing good work on hard problems is avoiding thinking in circles. Diversity of thought, if not necessarily skin, is good for that.
Diversity value is inversely proportional to how well you understand the problem at hand. If you're building a rocket to mars, you probably need fewer psychologists than mechanical engineers. If you're an advertising agency, the situation is likely reversed.
If you're building a rocket to Mars, you'd better have at least a few psychology types to anticipate (and prevent) miscommunications that result in a units-conversion error that blows up the shiny engineering thingie.
Diversity in this context seems to be programming language specialty which is completely reasonable when getting something off the ground. The whole school thing strikes me as weird though. Maybe if you're dealing with really green engineers stuff like that matters.
That's funny since I have a league 'hoops' game tonight. Exercise and other focus helps amazingly with my work. Weight lifting is another place where I come up with all sorts of solutions to work problems.
The whole paragraph from the lecture just struck me as a nerds revenge/jealously since here was a guy who was as smart as them and a jock. What could they possible lean on then to think themselves superior!?
