In addition I remember being taught that you ultimately want teams to "jel" much more than some marginal productivity gain you might get from diversity. Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? Notice that I mean this in the limited scope of programming I know there is evidence to the contrary at the management level.
In my opinion, no. It's been my experience that a large portion of programmers are the type to easily lose track of the real goal (delivering a product that generates business value) in favor of relatively unimportant details.
To make this short and blunt: I've watched a pair of mega-nerds geek out for a week, over-engineering and prematurely optimizing an unimportant feature. I've also watched an adult have an absolute emotional meltdown over curly brace placement.
In my opinion, diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.
>diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.
The term diversity by itself has no meaning. One needs to specify how groups of people are split up whenever using the word "diversity". Are we splitting the groups up by race, gender, economic class, technology experiences, etc.?
There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.
The term diversity by itself has no meaning.
Yes it does.
There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.
Okay, thanks for the tautology.
Homogeneous in what sense? It seems likely to me that things like sense of humor and work ethic would be lot more important than maleness when crafting your measure of homogeneity there.