Part of what I recommend to people when they are staffing out a test team is to get as diverse variety in the people in it as possible. The logic being that they can compensate for each others flaws. The implication is that flaws are bad.

So last week I was listening to podcasts on the way to work as I usually do and something was said that got me thinking that flaws are not bad, in fact they might actually be desirable. I tried to find the podcast and quote, but couldn’t.

With that idea starting to form in my head, Johanna timed her post, Hire for diversity of all kinds, really well. In it she says

It’s too easy if you have insufficient diversity to achieve group-think without meaning to. If you’re hiring for problem-solving skills, which is what we do in high tech, you want diversity of all kinds: personality, schooling, race, culture, to name just a few. Insufficient diversity leads to an inability to generate other and different solutions

The first two sentences still work in the flaws-are-good mindset. Tweaking the last one a bit you end up with Insufficient flaw diversity leads to an inability to generate other and different solutions. Suddenly the standard interview question of ‘what is your greatest flaw’ now packs some relevance instead of just something that gets asked due to a lack of originality on the part of the interviewer.