[random_i]

I previously assembled & managed a team of engineers at Microsoft.

Out of 10 employees on my team, I had:

- male and female (80/20 split)

- black, white, asian, latino

- engineers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s

- east coast, west coast

- ivy league, college and high-school graduates

That level of diversity was very rare at Microsoft, and even rarer at other tech companies.

It took a *lot* of work; with less effort I would have had a more uniform distribution (male, white/asian, younger, west coast)

[brap]

>It took a lot of work

A lot of work rejecting talented candidates of the wrong color?

[arghnoname]

From a business perspective, did it work? Was the team more, less, or equally effective than one where you didn't expend the time and expense of hiring a more homogenous group? Was turnover better or worse?

I know you can't absolutely know the counter-factual, but I've always wondered this. Incidentally, when I was a young man and CS major, I changed majors and went into a different field because I wanted to be around more women, but I've never known if being outside that kind of monoculture actually is better for the business or not.

[mruniverse]

Is the business perspective the right one to go with?

Let's say it's legal to discriminate on race in hiring in the US. Then a Japanese restaurant hires only Japanese workers because they find customers prefer it. Do we want to have this?

[curtisblaine]

How did you get there? Did you have to make a conscious choice, for minority candidates, to prefer them to majority candidates?

[mruniverse]

I think it's always conscious one way or the other. With or without DEI.

It could be close to blind if communication were only done through writing and the candidate names were not known.