The Best Feature I Ever Shipped Came From Five Countries

I manage a team of developers from India, Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Argentina. We build software for a security company. And the best work we produce, the most robust features, the most thoroughly considered edge cases, the most resilient architectures, comes directly from the fact that these people don’t all think the same way.

That’s not a DEI talking point. It’s an observation from sprint planning meetings, code reviews, and feature discussions I sit in every week.

When we’re designing a workflow, my developers in Argentina surface assumptions about connectivity that wouldn’t occur to someone who’s only ever worked on US infrastructure. My team members from India bring a different mental model for how users navigate hierarchies and permissions. The Canadians tend to flag accessibility considerations early. The Americans push for speed. The result isn’t consensus. It’s friction that produces better software.

I’m writing about this now because of what happened to IBM last week, and what it says about where we are as an industry.

What Happened to IBM

On April 10, 2026, IBM agreed to pay $17,077,043 to settle a Department of Justice investigation into its diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. The DOJ alleged that IBM took race, color, national origin, and sex into account when making employment decisions — specifically, that the company used a “diversity modifier” tying bonus compensation to demographic targets, altered interview criteria through diverse interview slates, set race and sex demographic goals for business units, and restricted access to certain training and mentoring programs based on race or sex. IBM then allegedly charged costs for these activities to its federal contracts and sought reimbursement.

The legal mechanism was the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era fraud statute. Because IBM is a federal contractor, it had to certify compliance with anti-discrimination requirements. The DOJ’s position is that IBM’s DEI programs themselves constituted discrimination, making those certifications false.

IBM denied any wrongdoing. The settlement is not an admission of liability. But IBM had already dismantled its DEI department, eliminated its Diversity Council, ended allyship training, and scrubbed decades of diversity information from its website before the settlement was even reached.

This is the first resolution under the DOJ’s Civil Rights Fraud Initiative, launched in May 2025. It will not be the last.

Two weeks before the settlement, President Trump signed Executive Order 14398, “Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors,” which requires all federal contracts to include a clause prohibiting “racially discriminatory DEI activities” by April 25, 2026. The order defines this as disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity in recruitment, employment, contracting, program participation, or resource allocation. Violations can result in contract termination, debarment, and False Claims Act liability.

The Research Says What I Already See

The research on diverse teams and performance is extensive and, frankly, not subtle. A BCG study found that companies with above-average diversity on their leadership teams reported innovation revenue 19 percentage points higher than less diverse companies. Harvard Business Review has published findings that cognitively diverse teams can solve complex problems significantly faster than homogeneous ones. Stanford research shows teams with differing perspectives generate substantially more creative solutions. A study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that teams with both compositional and informational diversity showed markedly better problem-solving capabilities.

I don’t need the studies, though. I see it. When five different cultural contexts hit a feature spec, the discussion goes wider before it converges. More assumptions get challenged. More edge cases get surfaced. The product is better.

But here’s the nuance the research also shows: the mechanism isn’t demographic diversity itself. It’s cognitive diversity: different ways of thinking, different problem-solving approaches, different mental models. Demographic diversity correlates with cognitive diversity because people from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences genuinely do think differently. The demographics aren’t the point; they’re a reliable signal for the thing that is.

What This Means If You’re a Manager

If you’re a manager at a company that holds federal contracts — and in the security industry, that’s a lot of us — the practical landscape has shifted. You cannot tie compensation to diversity metrics. You cannot restrict training programs by demographic category. You cannot set hiring quotas based on race or sex. You probably shouldn’t have the word “diversity” in any formal process documentation tied to federal work.

What you can do is build good teams. You can hire for varied experience, different technical backgrounds, international perspectives, and complementary problem-solving approaches. You can post jobs broadly. You can value the engineer who worked on payment systems in São Paulo alongside the one who built compliance tools in Toronto, because those are genuinely different skill sets that produce better software when combined.

The absurdity of the current moment is that I could, in theory, hire an entire team from a single country and face zero legal risk — even though that would produce a demonstrably weaker engineering organization. The law, as currently enforced, cares about the inputs to your hiring decisions, not the outputs of your team’s performance.

Where I Land

I’m not going to spend energy arguing about whether the IBM settlement was legally correct. I’m not a lawyer, and the underlying theory hasn’t been tested in court — IBM settled rather than litigating. The legal environment is what it is, and we work within the rules we have.

What I will say is this: I treat the people on my team with agency and respect. I value what each of them brings. Not because of where they’re from, but because of how they think, and the way their thinking makes everyone else’s thinking sharper. That’s not a policy. It’s just management.

The best feature I ever shipped came from a discussion where five different cultural assumptions about how users handle sensitive data collided in a conference room (well, a Teams call). Nobody was thinking about demographics in that moment. They were thinking about the problem. And because they were all thinking about it differently, we solved it better than any of us would have alone.

No executive order can legislate that away. And no settlement can make it less true.

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References

1. IBM pays $17M fine to end DOJ suit over DEI programs — TechCrunch (April 13, 2026) — Original reporting on the settlement announcement.
2. IBM to pay $17 million in anti-DEI settlement — CNN Business (April 10, 2026) — Settlement details, False Claims Act background, and IBM’s response.
3. IBM settles DOJ DEI hiring dispute for $17 million — Prism News (April 13, 2026) — Specific allegations including the diversity modifier, diverse interview slates, and reimbursement claims.
4. DOJ Secures First False Claims Act Settlement Under Civil Rights Fraud Initiative — Holland & Knight (April 2026) — Legal analysis of the settlement, Executive Order 14398, and implications for federal contractors.
5. IBM Pays $17 Million in First DEI-Related False Claims Act Resolution — Latham & Watkins (April 2026) — Detailed breakdown of damages calculation, settlement credits, and enforcement context.
6. Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors — The White House (March 26, 2026) — Full text of Executive Order 14398.
7. Another DEI Executive Order: What It Means for Employers — Epstein Becker Green (April 2026) — Practical compliance guidance for contractors and subcontractors under EO 14398.
8. IBM walks back decades of DEI efforts, removes messaging — HR Brew (May 6, 2025) — IBM’s dismantling of its DEI department, Diversity Council, and allyship programs prior to the settlement.
9. How Diverse Leadership Teams Boost Innovation — Boston Consulting Group — Study finding companies with above-average leadership diversity report 19 percentage points higher innovation revenue.
10. Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter — Harvard Business Review (November 2016) — Research on diverse teams outperforming homogeneous teams in financial returns and decision-making.
11. Diversity and Work Group Performance — Stanford Graduate School of Business — Informational diversity, constructive conflict, and the conditions under which diverse teams excel.
12. Why Diverse Teams Outperform Homogeneous Teams — NeuroLeadership Institute (February 2026) — Cognitive diversity, groupthink avoidance, and research on error detection in diverse groups.