I know this is a delicate topic to talk about, but I wanted to share my personal experience and opinion. The conversation around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) seems to be very binary, either “force people to hire diversity no matter the cost” or “just hire the most qualified person.” In a domain where it is never black and white, this polarized approach feels wrong. Like every polarized conversation, it divides people, causing them to defend their positions and attack those who think differently. DEI plays a role in a very grey and biased ecosystem, which is hiring, and you cannot have polarized policies or opinions when it comes to who you are working with.
DEI comes from the idea that a diverse group of experiences can yield better results when your job is to solve problems that affect all of us. My organization embedded it throughout the entire employee lifecycle—from hiring to promotion and raises. We trained ourselves to remove as much bias as we could to make the best decisions based on merit and skill. In software development, this strategy can be seen in how we consider disabilities, symbolism, and the organization of different points of view.
I want to share my perspective, shaped by my own experience working within an organization that successfully embraced a thoughtful DEI framework. This is a delicate topic, but it’s one that benefits immensely from kindness and empathy.
Eliminating Bias, Not Lowering the Bar
In my opinion, the true power of effective DEI programs is not to “quota” the teams you build, but to relentlessly expose and eliminate bias in the hiring teams themselves. DEI reduces bias by helping hiring teams pay attention to what really matters, not what feels more comfortable.
We cannot deny that it’s human nature to feel safer in spaces where there are people like us. When tasked with choosing a new colleague, the unconscious default is often to select someone who mirrors our own characteristics, especially if we fail to examine our own judgment biases.
The phrase “just hire the most qualified person” reveals to me a fundamental misunderstanding of the hiring process. Hiring is a very vague journey where the goal is to find a qualified person who can successfully do the job in a reasonable time, not magically identify the single “best” employee, particularly when the decision is filtered through a few hours of conversation with a handful of biased teammates.
This vague hiring process is where DEI plays a crucial role to eliminate biases as much as we can so that any candidate with the right skills is not disadvantaged by characteristics that might make them less appealing to the hiring team’s unconscious preferences. Since minorities are more likely to encounter this bias as problematic, DEI addresses this by reducing bias during the process.
The Business of Hiring: Acknowledging the Grey
The hiring ecosystem is a mix of grey. The bright line that should never be crossed is where we lower the bar for hiring because we are not getting enough diversity in our interviewee groups. Hiring is also a business decision that should take into consideration skills and merit. I am sure people want to be hired based on their merit, not their identity—which has not changed since they were born.
If your hiring process is successful, you’ll often get multiple people who are qualified for the job. In this case, choosing randomly would yield a similar outcome to spending a lot more effort trying to determine who is marginally more qualified. This is also an opportunity to organize the team with the new hire in mind, introducing a member who will not only bring the required skills but also bridge experience gaps that exist in the team.
But let’s be honest—a normal hiring process looks more like the secretary problem than choosing the local maximum.
The Representation Question
Most people would agree that when we talk about fighting for more representation, we’re not talking about entry-level jobs but those roles that can really steer the ship of an organization. For the past few decades in tech, we have seen many of these positions filled by a specific group of people, leaving us with the question: “Is there a more diverse way to lead?”
To answer this, we need to dive deeper into the representation of individuals who studied tech 30 years ago, which was not very diverse. That distribution is compounded by the level of stress and endurance someone needs to have to rise to that level of leadership. These positions are not something I would be able to take on. In my opinion, these positions are too much for one person, but there are people willing to take them on and absorb the responsibilities that entail.
I am hopeful that more diverse groups are coming out of universities and entering the job market, and we will see in 30 years a more diverse group of C-level executives and directors than we see today, improving the representation people are hoping for.
Moving Forward with Kindness
The need for robust DEI programs was created by decades of systemic and cultural trends in the workforce. We need to focus on understanding what happened and what is currently happening, rather than resorting to blame and pointing fingers.
We are a group of individuals with complex lives trying to find a space to explore our skills alongside other people who have their own complex lives. We can choose to be kind to each other. In my personal experience, more diverse teams tend to be more kind and understanding with others than teams where everyone shares the same background.
DEI’s strength is not about forcing anyone to fill a quota of diversity. It’s about recognizing our human tendency to gravitate toward similarity and providing tools to ensure we’re making decisions based on skills, merit, and potential rather than unconscious comfort with familiarity.
Let us commit to kindness, empathy, and the continuous, difficult work of reducing bias. When we do this, we don’t compromise merit. We clarify it, ensuring that true skill is what ultimately prevails.
Always be kind.