Given that a purely random inclusion of more applicants is likely to improve the situation. Thats before arguing for the merits of a diverse work force or relying on moral imperatives.
If you want to bring moral imperatives into it, one would think a basic commitment to truth and statistical literacy would be included, but it very rarely is. You'd also imagine diversity of thought would be included as a point of intellectual honesty, but in practice, it is the exact opposite.
As for software projects routinely failing, that has numerous possible explanations. One is that it's one of the most abstract forms of engineering around, in the sense that the material we manipulate and the arrangements we construct cannot be seen or touched, and hence are invisible to outsiders. It must rely entirely on explicit and deliberate communication, unlike more practical fields. The onus is entirely on the engineer to make himself understandable, and it is rare to find people gifted both in abstraction and verbal thinking.
Another is the recurring observation that schools are particularly bad at teaching the practical skills required to deliver software projects, being taught by people with little to no industry experience. It goes beyond basic project and code management skills and goes into product design and usability: people learn to build code when they should be learning to craft tools. But just because currently applications focus more on theory than practice, doesn't mean we'd get better results by turning to people who lack the theory entirely.
Given that is the biggest open question in the industry, who knows?
What we do know is that current hiring practices aren't inclusive & they aren't successful.
Are those things related? No idea, but I'm more willing to try inclusion than I am riddles for finding my next candidates.
We don't know either of those things, they are baseless claims. Software gets made, it gets shipped, it kinda works. Given the overwhelmingly horrifying incompetence of the vast majority of programmers, I would suggest we're actually going very well at interviewing and finding the rare competent candidates.
>No idea, but I'm more willing to try inclusion than I am riddles for finding my next candidates.
And I am more willing to put thought into it rather than do something likely to produce the opposite effect and justify it with a terrible strawman.