5 ms·

“Culture fit” craze is turning tech from innovators to ideological fiefdoms

59 points by emblem21 10y ago

revo13 10y ago
Coming from 4 years at a startup as emp#1 and looking again in Austin (engineering), if I hear one more time that "they loved you but didn't think you would be a good fit" instead of a real reason for missing the cut, I am going to go nuts.
- michaelbuddy 10y ago
  Not a good fit is PC language. Best way to get along these days apparently. I'll translate. "They Loved You" (No they were lukewarm at best but they're being polite at this point.) "Wouldn't be a good fit" (Not their responsibility to point out your flaws, some of which were subtle, some were obvious so keeping it brief and to the point. We know we can find somebody better or already have.)
  - revo13 10y ago
    Yeah, I know the foundation for it. It is just an irritating process (I know, stating the obvious) that should be better. Both the company and applicant invested time/money in exploring a relationship, and candidates shouldn't be left with a brutally ambiguous result. Even if it takes 5 more min in a debrief and some possible hurt feelings, the company should respect candidates enough to spend that time and help them understand the specific reason(s) as to why they aren't getting the job. I really want to know, was it my salary reqs, my quietness, my loudness, I looked wrong at the VP of Eng/CEO? This applies to onsite interviews obviously, not initial phone screens.
    - pwfisher 10y ago
      The company defaults to polite silence to avoid legal liability. They can't risk saying anything which might be construed as discrimination against a protected class.
      - Redoubts 10y ago
        I kind of wonder if "not a culture fit" could be construed that way if you were an underrepresented minority. It's pretty close to existing coded language.
        michaelbuddy 10y ago
        NO NO NO. This is a made up farce and does NOTHING for anyone but try to create 'victims' where they wouldn't exist. Microaggressions, coded language, these ridiculous terms come from a particular subset of sociologists who frankly don't deserve to be employed much less published. There's no science behind it, there's no benefit to it, and perpetuating it is causing the problems.
    - michaelbuddy 10y ago
      from the other comments you know reasons why they most likely won't debrief you. Occasionally you'll get honest and good feedback, related to a certain skillset missing. I mean if you wanted to try ahead of time, if they ask for an interview, maybe only agree with it if they transparent about XYZ for you. Just keep in mind that not getting a job is always a little ego damage and your ego will likely be seeking some comfort. The best comfort after those losses would be hitting the gym and moving on. Let your endorphins and physical training and progression lead the way. In case you were wondering, alcohol doesn't help and hurts worse in this process.
ikeyany 10y ago
I completely understand what he means, but his disdain would have a better effect if he compared the trendy "we don't take ourselves too seriously--see? Nerf wars and ping pong!" culture to the drab, grey, cubicle-dominated culture of the past. Companies take note: be a fun place, but protest too much about your culture and risk becoming a weird hive-minded cult.
justinzollars 10y ago
I've seen very qualified candidates passed over for people with no discernible skill because of "culture fit".
jmcdiesel 10y ago
I mean, the creator of these seems like someone I wouldn't want to work with. There is a lot to be said about creating a culture in a company, and grooming said culture, and making sure to preserve aspects of it you see as powerful for your employees... The "culture" of an open source tech shop is vastly different than a typical .Net tech shop - the clients are different, the dress codes are often more strict in the .net shops, the hierarchy and "feel" is far more corporate... Those are different worlds, and trying to stick someone from one into the other inevitably doesn't work well... at least not optimally..
- EliRivers 10y ago
  On the other hand, taking someone from a typical .Net tech shop and putting them into an open source tech shop suddenly gives that open source tech shop a whole new way of thinking; here's a person who is going to approach problems differently, and has a different set of experiences. By not hiring someone who thinks the same as everyone already there, the company becomes stronger. We should hire for culture-UNfit. Do you think differently? Are you going to give me options nobody else here would have thought of? Do you have experience with technologies that nobody else here does? Are you going to be able to fill in some of the blind spots and vulnerabilities that would stay open if I just hired someone identical to everyone else here? Hiring another person just the same gets me the ability to do a little more of the same. Hiring someone different gets me something new.
  - jmcdiesel 10y ago
    You're not hiring someone the same... You can have an entirely different skill set, knowledge base, experience base, and be a similar fit, culturally. But you know, if you have an office full of people who enjoy spending their time together, who play games together after work, who go to lunch and laugh and talk, who listen to music out loud and don't prefer to have a library-quiet office space, then hiring someone who prefers to be a loner, who doesnt play well with others, who is arrogant, who needs absolute silence to work... those are pain points. Culture and skills/experience are not at all related.
nwah1 10y ago
At a place I worked not too long ago, they fired a guy after two days because he was clearly an extremely huge asshole and stoner, and the reason they gave was that he wasn't a good culture fit. But it was just a polite way of saying that they didn't want an unkempt, disorderly, drug addict. Although, I must say, he did seem to be a fairly decent developer, as far as I could tell by talking with him over two days.
- jameskegel 10y ago
  What happened to those who screened/interviewed/hired this person? Were they spoken to about how this slipped under the radar?
  - nwah1 10y ago
    We talked about it, and we all agreed that his appearance and demeanor at the interview was much different than his appearance on his first day. He actually missed his start day, without notice, now that I remember, and started late. I looked up his music scene and realized he'd been at a rave in another state all weekend, and was clearly hungover and irritable.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  This is how I always saw it. It's a way for people to be politely unspecific about why they think the candidate is an asshole. I still hate it, but I understand it.
- tetrep 10y ago
  I think this is what most "culture fit" issues amount to. Attempts at politely declining someone's services. I'd prefer a more harsh/rude/straight/direct "we think you're an asshole" but one of the advantages of not giving someone a rational argument is that you don't have to deal with a rebuttal, you can't (rationally) argue against a culture mismatch, but you can argue that your behavior is not that of an "asshole" (or whatever other label can be applied to your undesirable attributes). This results in a "clean" rejection, where the rejected don't have traction for arguing that they'll "change" or "not do that again" when the rejecters simply don't want to deal with them anymore (for whatever their reasons, rational or otherwise). It's certainly not productive from the rejected's perspective, they truly might not know what they did to offend/displease their coworkers, but it can prevent awkward situations. By not including "real" reasons for rejected, your signaling the the rejected that your not interested in conversing about your decision and that your decision is final, regardless of the logic used to reach it (I think all of these are implicit properties when you don't share your logic behind a decision). As an added bonus, the same strategy works when rejecting people in your personal life, so there's also the societal familiarity/subtext that comes along with the generic rejection that can further emphasize the undesirability of continued interaction and the finality of the decision.
scott_s 10y ago
A longer-form take on this issue: "Inside the Mirrortocracy" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7930430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7930430
ironchef 10y ago
I think this can be true in some cases; however, it's also nice to look for things like: * Does this person think they're above grunt work / taking out the trash? * Does this person work better in a position where they take on responsibilities as they see fit or would they rather have work given to them? Neither one of those are captured in the "data-driven" hiring process; however, they are key in our particular company's culture. And yes... years of experience can be dismissed simply if the candidate thinks they're above everyone else.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  I think those are more about professionalism and work style than culture.
  - mc32 10y ago
    That's a distinction without much difference. but that said, yes, a culture fit focused hiring practice has dangers in it. Hiring form the same class and background, etc. (which happens in tech, finance, as well as your ethnic grocery store).
    - mdorazio 10y ago
      I have to disagree. Professionalism is not the same as culture. Every employee should strive to be professional and every company should strive to hire only people who demonstrate professionalism in their demeanor, communications, interpersonal relationships, etc. That's very different from "culture" as many HR departments see it, where fuzzy criteria cover everything from humor style to hobbies to age and gender.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I think those are more about professionalism and work style than culture. "professionalism" is one particular set of features of culture (and different people use the term to describe slightly different feature sets, but each definition is a set of culture features), and "work style" is a synonym for workplace culture.
bbctol 10y ago
I can't imagine that this issue doesn't manifest even more seriously when it comes to race and gender bias.
- trhway 10y ago
  being a white male (thanks, God!) i can't say for race and gender, yet it is definitely a way to filter out by age (i'm 44)
strathmeyer 10y ago
I've studied programming my whole life. But somehow someone I've never met before can decide I don't know how to program after fifteen minutes of questions. Guess I need to go memorize the meaning of 'polymorphism' again.
- superswordfish 10y ago
  You don't need the Oxford Dictionary definition, but any decent engineer who has touched an object-oriented language should be able to explain what polymorphism is. Come on.
  - oldsj 10y ago
    Shoot I even saw polymorphism come up in elixir (functional language) as well
  - strathmeyer 10y ago
    Sure, it's just difficult to think all that way back after I've talked about the operating system I designed and implemented. Don't worry, though, now I just get rejected for $12/hr data entry jobs. Come one. I've been suicidal for almost a decade and a half, now. How come nobody has any clue how to get programming jobs? Why doesn't that bother other programmers?
chollida1 10y ago
I wrote about why we got rid of cultural fit interview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911 a little over a year ago. The short answer was that we couldn't find a single thing that this interview helped with. And since then I have yet to hear anyone give a reasonable answer as to what a cultural fit interview provides. I mean by the time you are ready to hire someone, they've met the team and the team has already approved. We've already given them the hard sell on why they should work for us, infact this is what I spend half our initial phone screen doing, just selling the company. Almost all cultural fit interviews seem to be a form of asking: "Can we figure out if this person will dedicate all their waking hours to our company", and that's just really sad.
- jmcdiesel 10y ago
  The "culture fit" shouldnt be an interview all its own, its should be something that every person they speak to considers. Speaking only technically will give you that person's tech skills... that person's non-tech skills and nuances will actually have a huge effect on their performance and that of those they work closely with. Something powerful comes out of that - you learn intuitively what a person's true priorities are, and they do the same. You get a "feeling" about them and how they will incorporate into the team. those are just as important
- techcode 10y ago
  I've recently switched into doing "fit interviews", partially because it started to feel repetitive after 5 years (estimated 700-1000 candidates) of doing technical interviews. For us fit interviews make sense enough that we started doing them for every candidate, instead of just for ones that passed the technical parts, and I'll try to explain ... Maybe you can see something that could be useful for you. There's ~1000 people in our IT (and we are hiring - poke me if your interested), 50+ different nationalities, 95% of us are expats, we mostly do Perl code on BackEnd, expect everyone to have good commercial awareness (put ideas on backlog, push back on ProductOwner ...etc) and overall try to have the least bureaucracy/processes as possible. You can write code, push and roll it out into production within 30ish minutes - with no stamp/approval required (though on call sysadmin will ask you why are you doing it at 6am on a Sunday). IMHO quite an interesting setup for being majority part of publicly traded group (Nasdaq: PCLN). Most often you're not interviewed by people you'll work with (interviewers are not from same team). Fit interviewers focus/check commercial sense/awareness, motivation, flexibility regarding approaching things like tools and technology (we don't introduce new technology unless you can make a good commercial argument for it), follow up on anything raised by recruiters and technical interviewers, and also answer candidates questions. Indeed most of reasons we would not hire someone are noticed in other parts of interview as well. Besides being the ones who answer the most questions to candidates (besides recruitment) - fit interviews tend to be helpful for cases where everyone else is on the fence. If someone aced the tech parts - it's extremely rare fit interview is so bad we don't make an offer. BTW - everything mentioned is my personal interpretation ... If anyone has specific questions I'll try to answer them.
hkmurakami 10y ago
Hasn't this always been the case? Companies that carry on the "80s SV hardware startup mantra" (AAPL, along with repeat founders in semi conductor sector) are definitely fiefdoms that reflect the character of the founder.

59 points by emblem21 10y ago

Coming from 4 years at a startup as emp#1 and looking again in Austin (engineering), if I hear one more time that "they loved you but didn't think you would be a good fit" instead of a real reason for missing the cut, I am going to go nuts.

michaelbuddy 10y ago
Not a good fit is PC language. Best way to get along these days apparently. I'll translate. "They Loved You" (No they were lukewarm at best but they're being polite at this point.) "Wouldn't be a good fit" (Not their responsibility to point out your flaws, some of which were subtle, some were obvious so keeping it brief and to the point. We know we can find somebody better or already have.)
- revo13 10y ago
  Yeah, I know the foundation for it. It is just an irritating process (I know, stating the obvious) that should be better. Both the company and applicant invested time/money in exploring a relationship, and candidates shouldn't be left with a brutally ambiguous result. Even if it takes 5 more min in a debrief and some possible hurt feelings, the company should respect candidates enough to spend that time and help them understand the specific reason(s) as to why they aren't getting the job. I really want to know, was it my salary reqs, my quietness, my loudness, I looked wrong at the VP of Eng/CEO? This applies to onsite interviews obviously, not initial phone screens.
  - pwfisher 10y ago
    The company defaults to polite silence to avoid legal liability. They can't risk saying anything which might be construed as discrimination against a protected class.
    - Redoubts 10y ago
      I kind of wonder if "not a culture fit" could be construed that way if you were an underrepresented minority. It's pretty close to existing coded language.
      - michaelbuddy 10y ago
        NO NO NO. This is a made up farce and does NOTHING for anyone but try to create 'victims' where they wouldn't exist. Microaggressions, coded language, these ridiculous terms come from a particular subset of sociologists who frankly don't deserve to be employed much less published. There's no science behind it, there's no benefit to it, and perpetuating it is causing the problems.
  - michaelbuddy 10y ago
    from the other comments you know reasons why they most likely won't debrief you. Occasionally you'll get honest and good feedback, related to a certain skillset missing. I mean if you wanted to try ahead of time, if they ask for an interview, maybe only agree with it if they transparent about XYZ for you. Just keep in mind that not getting a job is always a little ego damage and your ego will likely be seeking some comfort. The best comfort after those losses would be hitting the gym and moving on. Let your endorphins and physical training and progression lead the way. In case you were wondering, alcohol doesn't help and hurts worse in this process.

ikeyany 10y ago

I completely understand what he means, but his disdain would have a better effect if he compared the trendy "we don't take ourselves too seriously--see? Nerf wars and ping pong!" culture to the drab, grey, cubicle-dominated culture of the past. Companies take note: be a fun place, but protest too much about your culture and risk becoming a weird hive-minded cult.

justinzollars 10y ago

I've seen very qualified candidates passed over for people with no discernible skill because of "culture fit".

jmcdiesel 10y ago

I mean, the creator of these seems like someone I wouldn't want to work with. There is a lot to be said about creating a culture in a company, and grooming said culture, and making sure to preserve aspects of it you see as powerful for your employees... The "culture" of an open source tech shop is vastly different than a typical .Net tech shop - the clients are different, the dress codes are often more strict in the .net shops, the hierarchy and "feel" is far more corporate... Those are different worlds, and trying to stick someone from one into the other inevitably doesn't work well... at least not optimally..

EliRivers 10y ago
On the other hand, taking someone from a typical .Net tech shop and putting them into an open source tech shop suddenly gives that open source tech shop a whole new way of thinking; here's a person who is going to approach problems differently, and has a different set of experiences. By not hiring someone who thinks the same as everyone already there, the company becomes stronger. We should hire for culture-UNfit. Do you think differently? Are you going to give me options nobody else here would have thought of? Do you have experience with technologies that nobody else here does? Are you going to be able to fill in some of the blind spots and vulnerabilities that would stay open if I just hired someone identical to everyone else here? Hiring another person just the same gets me the ability to do a little more of the same. Hiring someone different gets me something new.
- jmcdiesel 10y ago
  You're not hiring someone the same... You can have an entirely different skill set, knowledge base, experience base, and be a similar fit, culturally. But you know, if you have an office full of people who enjoy spending their time together, who play games together after work, who go to lunch and laugh and talk, who listen to music out loud and don't prefer to have a library-quiet office space, then hiring someone who prefers to be a loner, who doesnt play well with others, who is arrogant, who needs absolute silence to work... those are pain points. Culture and skills/experience are not at all related.

nwah1 10y ago

At a place I worked not too long ago, they fired a guy after two days because he was clearly an extremely huge asshole and stoner, and the reason they gave was that he wasn't a good culture fit. But it was just a polite way of saying that they didn't want an unkempt, disorderly, drug addict. Although, I must say, he did seem to be a fairly decent developer, as far as I could tell by talking with him over two days.

jameskegel 10y ago
What happened to those who screened/interviewed/hired this person? Were they spoken to about how this slipped under the radar?
- nwah1 10y ago
  We talked about it, and we all agreed that his appearance and demeanor at the interview was much different than his appearance on his first day. He actually missed his start day, without notice, now that I remember, and started late. I looked up his music scene and realized he'd been at a rave in another state all weekend, and was clearly hungover and irritable.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
CaptSpify 10y ago
This is how I always saw it. It's a way for people to be politely unspecific about why they think the candidate is an asshole. I still hate it, but I understand it.
tetrep 10y ago
I think this is what most "culture fit" issues amount to. Attempts at politely declining someone's services. I'd prefer a more harsh/rude/straight/direct "we think you're an asshole" but one of the advantages of not giving someone a rational argument is that you don't have to deal with a rebuttal, you can't (rationally) argue against a culture mismatch, but you can argue that your behavior is not that of an "asshole" (or whatever other label can be applied to your undesirable attributes). This results in a "clean" rejection, where the rejected don't have traction for arguing that they'll "change" or "not do that again" when the rejecters simply don't want to deal with them anymore (for whatever their reasons, rational or otherwise). It's certainly not productive from the rejected's perspective, they truly might not know what they did to offend/displease their coworkers, but it can prevent awkward situations. By not including "real" reasons for rejected, your signaling the the rejected that your not interested in conversing about your decision and that your decision is final, regardless of the logic used to reach it (I think all of these are implicit properties when you don't share your logic behind a decision). As an added bonus, the same strategy works when rejecting people in your personal life, so there's also the societal familiarity/subtext that comes along with the generic rejection that can further emphasize the undesirability of continued interaction and the finality of the decision.

scott_s 10y ago

A longer-form take on this issue: "Inside the Mirrortocracy" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7930430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7930430

ironchef 10y ago

I think this can be true in some cases; however, it's also nice to look for things like: * Does this person think they're above grunt work / taking out the trash? * Does this person work better in a position where they take on responsibilities as they see fit or would they rather have work given to them? Neither one of those are captured in the "data-driven" hiring process; however, they are key in our particular company's culture. And yes... years of experience can be dismissed simply if the candidate thinks they're above everyone else.

vonmoltke 10y ago
I think those are more about professionalism and work style than culture.
- mc32 10y ago
  That's a distinction without much difference. but that said, yes, a culture fit focused hiring practice has dangers in it. Hiring form the same class and background, etc. (which happens in tech, finance, as well as your ethnic grocery store).
  - mdorazio 10y ago
    I have to disagree. Professionalism is not the same as culture. Every employee should strive to be professional and every company should strive to hire only people who demonstrate professionalism in their demeanor, communications, interpersonal relationships, etc. That's very different from "culture" as many HR departments see it, where fuzzy criteria cover everything from humor style to hobbies to age and gender.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I think those are more about professionalism and work style than culture. "professionalism" is one particular set of features of culture (and different people use the term to describe slightly different feature sets, but each definition is a set of culture features), and "work style" is a synonym for workplace culture.

bbctol 10y ago

I can't imagine that this issue doesn't manifest even more seriously when it comes to race and gender bias.

trhway 10y ago
being a white male (thanks, God!) i can't say for race and gender, yet it is definitely a way to filter out by age (i'm 44)

strathmeyer 10y ago

I've studied programming my whole life. But somehow someone I've never met before can decide I don't know how to program after fifteen minutes of questions. Guess I need to go memorize the meaning of 'polymorphism' again.

superswordfish 10y ago
You don't need the Oxford Dictionary definition, but any decent engineer who has touched an object-oriented language should be able to explain what polymorphism is. Come on.
- oldsj 10y ago
  Shoot I even saw polymorphism come up in elixir (functional language) as well
- strathmeyer 10y ago
  Sure, it's just difficult to think all that way back after I've talked about the operating system I designed and implemented. Don't worry, though, now I just get rejected for $12/hr data entry jobs. Come one. I've been suicidal for almost a decade and a half, now. How come nobody has any clue how to get programming jobs? Why doesn't that bother other programmers?

chollida1 10y ago

I wrote about why we got rid of cultural fit interview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911 a little over a year ago. The short answer was that we couldn't find a single thing that this interview helped with. And since then I have yet to hear anyone give a reasonable answer as to what a cultural fit interview provides. I mean by the time you are ready to hire someone, they've met the team and the team has already approved. We've already given them the hard sell on why they should work for us, infact this is what I spend half our initial phone screen doing, just selling the company. Almost all cultural fit interviews seem to be a form of asking: "Can we figure out if this person will dedicate all their waking hours to our company", and that's just really sad.

jmcdiesel 10y ago
The "culture fit" shouldnt be an interview all its own, its should be something that every person they speak to considers. Speaking only technically will give you that person's tech skills... that person's non-tech skills and nuances will actually have a huge effect on their performance and that of those they work closely with. Something powerful comes out of that - you learn intuitively what a person's true priorities are, and they do the same. You get a "feeling" about them and how they will incorporate into the team. those are just as important
techcode 10y ago
I've recently switched into doing "fit interviews", partially because it started to feel repetitive after 5 years (estimated 700-1000 candidates) of doing technical interviews. For us fit interviews make sense enough that we started doing them for every candidate, instead of just for ones that passed the technical parts, and I'll try to explain ... Maybe you can see something that could be useful for you. There's ~1000 people in our IT (and we are hiring - poke me if your interested), 50+ different nationalities, 95% of us are expats, we mostly do Perl code on BackEnd, expect everyone to have good commercial awareness (put ideas on backlog, push back on ProductOwner ...etc) and overall try to have the least bureaucracy/processes as possible. You can write code, push and roll it out into production within 30ish minutes - with no stamp/approval required (though on call sysadmin will ask you why are you doing it at 6am on a Sunday). IMHO quite an interesting setup for being majority part of publicly traded group (Nasdaq: PCLN). Most often you're not interviewed by people you'll work with (interviewers are not from same team). Fit interviewers focus/check commercial sense/awareness, motivation, flexibility regarding approaching things like tools and technology (we don't introduce new technology unless you can make a good commercial argument for it), follow up on anything raised by recruiters and technical interviewers, and also answer candidates questions. Indeed most of reasons we would not hire someone are noticed in other parts of interview as well. Besides being the ones who answer the most questions to candidates (besides recruitment) - fit interviews tend to be helpful for cases where everyone else is on the fence. If someone aced the tech parts - it's extremely rare fit interview is so bad we don't make an offer. BTW - everything mentioned is my personal interpretation ... If anyone has specific questions I'll try to answer them.

hkmurakami 10y ago

Hasn't this always been the case? Companies that carry on the "80s SV hardware startup mantra" (AAPL, along with repeat founders in semi conductor sector) are definitely fiefdoms that reflect the character of the founder.