Ask HN: If Diversity Is Important, How Come FAANG Aren't That Diverse? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If Diversity Is Important, How Come FAANG Aren't That Diverse?

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Seriously. We see a lot of articles and studies about how more diverse teams are supposedly better for companies/groups, how they come up with new perspectives than non diverse teams, etc...

Then I look at the likes of Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/whatever and most of the employees seem to have pretty similar backgrounds. Mostly from wealthier families, went to good universities, often predominately male... yet the companies they work for make billions of dollars and are perfectly able to create products and services most of the world's population uses and depends on.

Where's the real world evidence that diverse teams do better, if most the large companies out there seem to be anything but diverse?

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Diversity is in large part about the rich white class of Americans shifting blame for the 2008 financial crisis to all white Americans, thus diluting the blame significantly as it was spread over 40% of the population instead of 1%. This neutered any significant political change that might have resulted.

Also, the diversity they talk about still results in people all coming from New York, LA, Philadelphia, etc. It’s the urban rich along with a select few of the urban poor, and they all went to school together anyway, thus rendering moot any benefit diversity would have provided.

This is something I've suspected for a while myself. A lot of the more menial diversity complaints (like pronouns and what not) do seem rather meaningless compared to things like wealth inequality and what not, and feel like a definite distraction after stuff like Occupy shook the 1% a bit.

I personally don't think the lack of diversity is a choice. My experience is software companies would like to be more diverse than they are - but are actually grateful if they can simply get someone with the right tech skills. There are many initiatives in play, but it will take time for the effects to feed through.

> if they can simply get someone with the right tech skills.

I think this may definitely be part of it. If diversity has any effects, then it's quite likely they're outweighed by other business factors that may have a bigger influence on the success of the company (like financial backing, an original/meaningful idea, high levels of skill in tech/design/marketing, simply being in the right place at the right time to capture an upcoming market, etc).

But perhaps it may be visible in a situation with evenly matched companies on all those other things.

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