I already hinted at this topic in my last Tech Tuesday, when I wrote about having a healthy mix of young and more experienced engineers. More generally, diversity in engineering teams (and teams more generally) tends to be a healthy thing. Diversity helps prevent group think and provides for a better match with the wide variety of tasks that come up in the live of a startup engineering team. In the extreme if all you have are say realtime systems engineers your UI/UX is likely to be atrocious (exceptions to this notwithstanding).
Diversity is particularly difficult to achieve in engineering for two reasons. First, many engineering teams grow highly organically with people referring their friends. And that’s often a good thing because it can help identify high quality candidates quickly. But if you hire one person from say Google, you may wind up with a whole team of ex-Google people if you don’t pay attention. There is nothing wrong per se with hiring from Google, but Google does everything at scale and highly engineered whereas at a startup you often need to just make do with something a bit makeshift. So you want at least some people on your team who know how to do that and be comfortable with it.
The second reason that diversity is hard to achieve in engineering is that the applicant pool isn’t very diverse to begin with. So unless you make an effort you can wind up with a very homogenous team. For instance, it is not unusual to find startups with engineering teams with a dozen or more people and not one female engineer. Once you have reached a certain team size it actually gets much harder to become diverse. I went through this many years ago with a consulting startup in Germany where we grew to be about two dozen consultants and had failed to hire even one woman which made the place pretty uninviting to female candidates.
For an example of what making an effort means, you can read this great summary of how Etsy significantly grew the number of female engineers on their team. There are many pro-active things you can do, once you are focused on diversity. And the sooner you get going the better off your team will be.
