I taught engineering courses for 10 years and have worked in the field longer than that, and I can assure you there is rarely a such thing as a “most competent person for the job.” Especially once you get to the highest levels of performance.
I can also assure you that teams which are allowed to stay familiar and homogeneous (eg, a bunch of bros who live together) and are never pushed to include diversity of experience and background rarely achieve anything notable compared to teams who are pushed beyond their cultural comfort zones. Anecdotally, the effect could not be more clear, and there’s plenty of peer reviewed literature documenting this.
Tl;Dr - mechanical diversity has intrinsic value. Read a book
I taught engineering courses for 10 years and have worked in the field longer than that, and I can assure you there is rarely a such thing as a “most competent person for the job.” Especially once you get to the highest levels of performance.
I can also assure you that teams which are allowed to stay familiar and homogeneous (eg, a bunch of bros who live together) and are never pushed to include diversity of experience and background rarely achieve anything notable compared to teams who are pushed beyond their cultural comfort zones. Anecdotally, the effect could not be more clear, and there’s plenty of peer reviewed literature documenting this.
Tl;Dr - mechanical diversity has intrinsic value. Read a book