Cognitive Diversity in Tech

In today's climate diversity is a big subject. Every Org is trying to be more diverse and to be more fair. Someone once told me that skills and talent are pretty distributed, but opportunity is not. I think I agree with this for the most part.

One diversity piece I think gets overlooked by tons, and especially in tech, is [cognitive diversity](https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-theyre-more-cognitively-diverse). Tech teams often create echo chambers, and often surround themselves with people who just want to do the same thing. This can potentially really hurt innovation, and culture.

I see posts all the time in this sub around "\_\_\_\_\_ things a sys admin needs to know," and while some of the content can be pretty well rounded and spot on, a lot of the content can be really specific to the Org that person works for. Teams should definitely look at being diverse around gender, ethnicity, background, so on and so forth. Even though it is professional to leave your personal life at home when you go to work, that is really not possible. So, just being different means you can have different outlooks based on your different experiences. This helps create multiple ways to solve a problem in a more natural way.

I don't have any answers, I just have what has worked for, my employers, my teams, and so forth. At one point in time I worked in vendor space and traveled internationally for work. I got to work in both Asia and Europe. The cultural differences were very interesting, and honestly humbling to learn. That small experience has definitely helped me to open my views and helped reinforce I only knew what I knew and nothing else.

So, don't try to build teams in vacuums, or create echo chambers. Try to create culture around change, and inclusiveness. Sadly, I have had a few jobs where the engineers could not be involved in decision making and it was not because they did not have the skills, it was because as a team a few of the engineers were petty, control freaks, and argumentative about everything. So, the entire team suffered due to a few minority. This ruined the team's culture and of course management at the time was clueless and did not care. The only thing the manager cared about was moving up the corporate ladder as fast as they could.

It is okay to learn new things, try new ideas, and go for those moon shots. If it doesn't work then who cares, at least you tried. You'll never know what tools, tech stacks, languages, and so forth work for you until you try them. It is okay to be wrong, it is okay to fail, but getting stuck in infinite loops due to lack of diversity of ideas is never a good thing.

When I look at job reqs my team gets and I chat with my direct boss about who we should hire or what we should look for, I typically try to get people that have different skills. This way, they can bring something new to the team, they can help build something in a better way, and then we can all mentor and cross train each other over time, and now all of us have new skills. I typically don't try to hire carbon copy clones of the same type of engineer. I always want cognitive and skill diversity. Don't have anyone on the team that really knows containers? Cool, next job req we get we will ask for container experience. Then we can have a diverse team, and the team culture is to spread knowledge so over time we can all become container experts and the container person we hired can learn all the systems engineering stuff we do.