There is no question in my mind that hiring practices should be reworked to be more fair. But people will differ on what they consider fair. If "fair" means reworking hiring practices to favor "diverse candidates," and I'm actually not against that, we need to be prepared for the obvious follow-up question, which is, "If the best candidate doesn't meet our diversity requirements, can our company afford to pass on that candidate?" Frankly, I think this varies by company and that isn't often given its due weight in this discussion.

I've worked for large corporations that employ thousands of engineers. Those companies can afford the risk of hiring the wrong candidate. Regardless of any candidate's gender or skin color, no single hire, no matter whether they're a rock star or can't code their way out of a paper bag, is going to affect the overall depth of such a company's talent pool.

I've also worked for startups with only two dozen employees -- and not all of them engineers, either. Can that sort of company afford the risk of hiring the wrong candidate? In my humble opinion -- no. On that scale, just a couple wrong hires can make or break the entire company.

Then there's this -- the tech sector has an obvious problem with a lack of diversity, but it didn't create the problem. (For what it's worth, there also aren't enough women and minority doctors or lawyers in the country.) It's not the tech sector that's telling boys to wear blue, love superheroes, and play with computers. It's not the tech sector that's telling girls to wear pink, play with Barbies, and learn to cook. It's society's doing this and it is wrong. Diversity has real value, so whether a non-diverse company is self-aware enough to know it or not, it suffers from its own lack of diversity. In a perverse way, and I feel weird saying it, the tech sector is also a victim in all of this. We don't talk about that not only because it feels icky to say it, but also because the tech sector's runaway hubris, evident in grandiose mission statements like, "Empowering every person on the planet to live their best life," fools both sides of this debate into thinking the tech sector can fix this just by tweaking their hiring practices. That can be a component of the solution, but it's not enough.

If we want to see more women and minorities in tech, we need to start by preparing more women and minorities for careers in that sector. The most effective thing the tech sector could be doing to improve diversity right now would be funding scholarships for women and minorities to study in STEM fields.