When we talk about hiring diverse tech teams, we are typically referring to diversity in race, gender, orientation etc. This is super important, martin fowler has an excellent blog post on the topic.
However there is another diversity we need in tech teams. I call this “diversity of tech in tech”, weird. Some of the best teams I have worked with came from a diversity of tech communities. Javascripters, pythonisters, Rubist, and Javalores, etc. all working together, it’s magical. The differing points of view from those communities, help to find novel and clever solutions. Also I’ve found that, drawing analogies between one framework and another, to be the fastest way to pick up new tech stacks.
The benefits to the respective communities cannot be understated. I still remember being at a javascript user group meetup in the early days of the javascript community emergence. Here I recall speaking to a PHP dev about how backbone models are kinda like rails models, which started a conversation on cakePHP. Then another about how dependency injection in angular is similar to spring IoC. I thought “this must be the most diverse group of engineers I have seen”
Bias. Often when we talk about hiring diverse teams, we need to check our unconscious bias. Sure enough, when I looked over some hiring conversions. I’ve see something like this:
Person 1: “Nice resume, has done some TDD, 3 years of experience”
Person 2: “only has one year of Rails experience, and our stack is in Rails”
Person 1: “What was the other 2 years in?”
Person 2: “Mostly PHP, yuk”
Person 1: “yeh PHP, has probably destroyed this person, PASS”
So sad. We may all be missing out on amazing engineers every time we list a position as “Senoir Java Developer”, or even worse as “Javascript Jedi”, “Ruby ninja” etc.
My advise would be to focus on the principles and practices of the engineers, rather than the specific tech stacks and languages. For example, the tech screen I do, I let the candidate use whatever web framework they are most comfortable with. This way we can focus on, how would you put a web app together. And added bonus I might be able to learn something too!
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