Hire Different

This isn't a real ad, but I pulled all of the attribute words (world-class programming skills, outstanding, excellent, bright, talented) from a Google job listing. The last line about being a loser is all mine ; ) But it's not just Google that's looking for the best and brightest, of course.

I have to admit that this sounds exactly like the kind of developers I'd love to spend time working with. They'd be good for me. They'd raise my skills, and I'd probably get a little smarter just being near programmers who are world-class, exceptional, outstanding, excellent, bright, and talented. And there are plenty of people out there who meet that criteria.

The trouble is, those who meet that criteria often tend to be... similar. There's a reasonably good chance that they got to be world-class developers by having a somewhat similar background, from the C.S. degree at a top-notch school to work experience at a recognized company.

And in the US, that means they also tend to be under 45, white, and male.

So what?

According to James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, that lack of diversity can hurt both innovation and decision-making. Sometimes with terrible consequences.

But he contends that it's not necessarily the lack of demographic diversity that's at the heart of the problems... it's cognitive diversity you need. If those doing the hiring are going after only world-class, exceptionally bright people with similar skills, the differences between the Chosen Ones may not be that useful. He claims the company needs to hire not just only the smartest people!

And he cites lots of studies to back this up. Studies that demonstrate that a more diverse group, with fewer of the smartest people, under the right conditions, will consistently make better decisions than a group made of nothing but the smartest people. It's a pretty compelling argument when you look at the research he points to (although you might not always agree with his conclusions on some of it.)

One dramatic example involves what happened at NASA with the Columbia disaster. I won't go into his details (it's nearly a chapter long and includes other group dynamic factors besides lack of diversity), but here's one of his main points:

"What was missing most from the MMT, of course, was diversity, by which I mean not sociological diversity but rather cognitive diversity. James Oberg, a former Mission Control operator and now NBC News correspondent, has made the counterintuitive point that the NASA teams that presided over the Apollo missions were actually more diverse than the MMT. This seems hard to believe, since every engineer at Mission Control in the late 60's had the same crew cut and wore the same short-sleeved white shirt. But as Oberg points out, most of those men had worked outside of NASA in many differrent industries before coming to the agency. NASA employees today are far more likely to have come to the agency directly out of graduate school, which means they are also far less likely to have divergent opinions. That matters because, in small groups, diversity of opinion is the single best guarantee that the group will reap benefits from face-to-face discussion."

I'm not doing his arguments justice here, because it really does take the whole book to explain how--and why--all this works. But it made me think that Hire Different should be just as important as Hire Smart. I would hope that all hiring managers everywhere will read this book and perhaps get a new (counterintuitive) insight into why they might actually get a better result by, um, lowering their standards. Although I don't think of it as lowering, since candidate A who has this different perspective but isn't, say, as young, high-IQ, or classically-trained as candidate B, might bring something even more valuable. In other words, what you lose in IQ points might be more than made up for by other things...

And in A Whole New Mind Dan Pink has a startling statistic: IQ accounts for less than 15% of career sucess. (Then he mentions research that suggests the most effective leaders are those who are funny--those who have their employees laughing much more than other managers do.)

I hope every hiring manager reads both of these books and at least considers some of their main points. And if you're looking for a job, the studies/research/stats in these books might give you a little more ammunition when you're up against the "we only want to hire people just like the world-class people we already have" attitude. It might help you learn to frame/position what you do bring, in ways that might not be immediately obvious.