> It's a huge benefit as a developer (and obviously other professions too) to work on teams with people who have lived very different lives.
I can see how that would be true for some types of development, but there are also many type for which I don't see offhand how it would matter.
For instance, if I were doing web design for my employer's shopping cart site I could see how having a diverse team could greatly help because the team would have people on it that are part of or identify with more of our customer demographics.
I as a white male mid-50s atheist tall fat guy could easily inadvertently come up with a design that might turn off non-whites, females, young people or elderly people, religious people, short people, or skinny people. Even if I don't end up doing something to offend people, I could simply miss opportunities that people of other backgrounds might see.
In fact, I've seen that kind of thing. I saw a company that was making CD-ROM caching software in the '90s find a nice cluster of sales when an employee who was also a Mormon pointed out that this software worked extremely well with the CD-ROM genealogy databases that were becoming quite popular among Mormons. Without that Mormon employee, they would have probably never noticed that Mormons could be a distinct market segment for this product that was worth specifically targeting.
What I actually work on, though, is backend stuff like processing orders and subscription billing, interfacing to payment processors, reporting sales tax in the US and VAT in Europe, analyzing A/B tests, and so on. Would having a diverse team working on this actually produce any different results?