Imagine you keep applying for jobs and you get none because all the existing employees are recommending their friends who are inferior to you in skills, but the company is prioritizing referrals.
This is, and has always been, a real problem: That your ability to get good positions is limited not by your skill set but by your ability to network.
You only need a laptop to set up a company in this field. If there are separate networks of different ethnities (or whatever you mean by diversity) their companies should be able to win over the ones who are not hiring based on pure skill and abilities. Does this happen?
2. The notion that companies will win purely due to skill is questionable. I would highly recommend listening to "How I Built This". Skill is a significant factor, but companies that win do not always do so based on skill.
Generally if you have good skills people will want to network with you, unless you're anti-social or have some other personality issues. Keep in mind that technical skills are just one component in a good coworker.
This comment reveals another problem - if a person is not interested in networking for the sake of it, they're slapped with the "anti-social" or "personality disorder" labels.
Anecdotally, some of the best engineers I've worked with despise the networking culture and prefer to keep to themselves, while some of the most "social" and "networking" people were grifters who didn't have much skill, but knew how to appear like they do.
> Generally if you have good skills people will want to network with you, unless you're anti-social or have some other personality issues.
Not really. In my experience that is the exception rather than the rule. Especially because most people will have no way to know you have good skills if they don't already know you.
I would put it this way: in these times of massive layoffs, if you're a programmer and you don't network, you're doing it wrong. There are exceptions, e.g. for genius types, but the rest of us better be social.
This is, and has always been, a real problem: That your ability to get good positions is limited not by your skill set but by your ability to network.