5 ms·

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

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.
- mdorazio 10y ago
  You just described criteria for determining who should join your frat house, not who should help you build products. Different people have different working styles and yet are still perfectly able to contribute to teams, often in ways that your culturally integrated group can't even see. I think you've fallen into the trap of confusing the people with whom you work and the people with whom you are friends. There is zero need for those two groups to overlap, and it's really only in the tech world where the "culture fit" phenomenon is trying to force them together, often to try and get employees to work longer for free.
  - jmcdiesel 10y ago
    Or maybe your perspective (which seems jaded) is a bit different than a lot of peoples? There is no reason that your friends and co-workers shouldnt overlap. There is no reason you shouldn't love going to work. There is no reason you shouldn't be happy in the company of the people you're around the majority of your day. Your very post, is just you applying your own culture to a job. Part of your culture in the workplace is a detachment. Thats ok, everyone has their own thing, but you wouldn't fit into a place where people want to be inclusive, you would stand out and probably be considered an asshole by others. You see that your view on what should happen in a workplace is very different than mine. That would cause strife over time, it would reduce our ability to work together compared to people who shared our viewpoint... While your view is equally as valid as mine, and neither are more correct than the other, they are definitely different. Recognizing that difference is what the culture fit is all about. And your last line, comes of as purely cynical. I don't work longer for free because i like my coworkers... I still work the same regardless, but I tend to LIKE going to work more, and enjoy my time, and feel more invested in the company when I enjoy my coworkers and share a bond with them...
    - Jtsummers 10y ago
      If leaving Friday and not seeing your coworkers again until Monday morning makes you think someone's an asshole, you've got a very skewed definition of asshole. Being friends/social with coworkers should be an opt-in experience, not mandatory for your employees. People have lives. There is no reason you shouldn't be happy in the company of the people you're around the majority of your day. I hope to god I never spend the majority of my day in the office ever again. Work is 8 hours for me, and I love it. I'll put in overtime when I need to, I don't mind. But I get 10 hours a day of not being at work while also awake, part of it in the middle of the day at lunch. I'm friends with several of my coworkers (to varying degrees of closeness), but we're all adults, most have families, and most have hobbies or other goals. We've got bodybuilders (including a former olympian), and other athletes. We've got artists. We've got gamers. We've got homebodies. We've got authors. If work=life is the only way to fit into your office, it had better be doing something life changing to justify that demand from your employees. Otherwise, you're stealing their precious time. The one thing we can never get back.
romanovcode 10y ago
Ugh, nowadays typical .NET dev is well-aware of what is open source because, FYI .NET is open sourced.
- cema 10y ago
  In my experience, "open source" is sometimes a code word for non-enterprise technologies, such as RoR and php and so on.
- EliRivers 10y ago
  Tell you what, replace .NET with anything you like. You've focussed on the one thing I said that's meaningless and utterly superfluous to the point.
  - romanovcode 10y ago
    I just don't like the outdated stereotype, that's all.
throwaway3840 10y ago
>We should hire for culture-UNfit. Yeah, I'll hire a misogynist and a feminist and see how that turns out. /s
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  Apples to oranges. GP was talking about from technical perspectives, you're talking about social/political/ethical perspectives.
Jtsummers 10y ago
> 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. At one job we had some people hired who, from the stories I'm reading here, wouldn't have been good "culture fits" at a lot of companies. They were older (50+). Didn't hang out after work. Came from a different background (cellphones). Instead, one brought us much improved coding standards that greatly accelerated our development process (by greatly reducing our debugging time). The other was just ludicrously efficient as a programmer and knew the ins and outs of embedded like no one else and single-handedly rewrote one of our major projects (which the bosses had been toying with hiring a consultant to do). But they weren't like the rest of us. Single, 20-something, male (not universally white, we had a decent mix there). They didn't hang out with us on Saturday night. They didn't go to lunch with us. They didn't game with us when we had random game nights. But as professionals, they brought expertise and experience and mentorship that we desperately needed.
- superswordfish 10y ago
  I've had the same experience, but only with embedded developers like you described. It probably has more to do with how talent is distributed age-wise in that field.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    The good embedded programmers are awesome, and there's probably something beneficial to the era they developed their skills in. These guys would've started programming in the 70s, when even desktops weren't as powerful as a couple of the chips we got to use in our "embedded" environment. They came out of that era without being spaghetti-coders like a couple of the guys that were, basically, ousted before I got to that office. So they learned to code well within constrained (cycles, memory) environments. As more cycles and memory became available, they just used it more effectively.

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.

mdorazio 10y ago
You just described criteria for determining who should join your frat house, not who should help you build products. Different people have different working styles and yet are still perfectly able to contribute to teams, often in ways that your culturally integrated group can't even see. I think you've fallen into the trap of confusing the people with whom you work and the people with whom you are friends. There is zero need for those two groups to overlap, and it's really only in the tech world where the "culture fit" phenomenon is trying to force them together, often to try and get employees to work longer for free.
- jmcdiesel 10y ago
  Or maybe your perspective (which seems jaded) is a bit different than a lot of peoples? There is no reason that your friends and co-workers shouldnt overlap. There is no reason you shouldn't love going to work. There is no reason you shouldn't be happy in the company of the people you're around the majority of your day. Your very post, is just you applying your own culture to a job. Part of your culture in the workplace is a detachment. Thats ok, everyone has their own thing, but you wouldn't fit into a place where people want to be inclusive, you would stand out and probably be considered an asshole by others. You see that your view on what should happen in a workplace is very different than mine. That would cause strife over time, it would reduce our ability to work together compared to people who shared our viewpoint... While your view is equally as valid as mine, and neither are more correct than the other, they are definitely different. Recognizing that difference is what the culture fit is all about. And your last line, comes of as purely cynical. I don't work longer for free because i like my coworkers... I still work the same regardless, but I tend to LIKE going to work more, and enjoy my time, and feel more invested in the company when I enjoy my coworkers and share a bond with them...
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    If leaving Friday and not seeing your coworkers again until Monday morning makes you think someone's an asshole, you've got a very skewed definition of asshole. Being friends/social with coworkers should be an opt-in experience, not mandatory for your employees. People have lives. There is no reason you shouldn't be happy in the company of the people you're around the majority of your day. I hope to god I never spend the majority of my day in the office ever again. Work is 8 hours for me, and I love it. I'll put in overtime when I need to, I don't mind. But I get 10 hours a day of not being at work while also awake, part of it in the middle of the day at lunch. I'm friends with several of my coworkers (to varying degrees of closeness), but we're all adults, most have families, and most have hobbies or other goals. We've got bodybuilders (including a former olympian), and other athletes. We've got artists. We've got gamers. We've got homebodies. We've got authors. If work=life is the only way to fit into your office, it had better be doing something life changing to justify that demand from your employees. Otherwise, you're stealing their precious time. The one thing we can never get back.

romanovcode 10y ago

Ugh, nowadays typical .NET dev is well-aware of what is open source because, FYI .NET is open sourced.

cema 10y ago
In my experience, "open source" is sometimes a code word for non-enterprise technologies, such as RoR and php and so on.
EliRivers 10y ago
Tell you what, replace .NET with anything you like. You've focussed on the one thing I said that's meaningless and utterly superfluous to the point.
- romanovcode 10y ago
  I just don't like the outdated stereotype, that's all.

throwaway3840 10y ago

>We should hire for culture-UNfit. Yeah, I'll hire a misogynist and a feminist and see how that turns out. /s

Jtsummers 10y ago
Apples to oranges. GP was talking about from technical perspectives, you're talking about social/political/ethical perspectives.

Jtsummers 10y ago

> 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. At one job we had some people hired who, from the stories I'm reading here, wouldn't have been good "culture fits" at a lot of companies. They were older (50+). Didn't hang out after work. Came from a different background (cellphones). Instead, one brought us much improved coding standards that greatly accelerated our development process (by greatly reducing our debugging time). The other was just ludicrously efficient as a programmer and knew the ins and outs of embedded like no one else and single-handedly rewrote one of our major projects (which the bosses had been toying with hiring a consultant to do). But they weren't like the rest of us. Single, 20-something, male (not universally white, we had a decent mix there). They didn't hang out with us on Saturday night. They didn't go to lunch with us. They didn't game with us when we had random game nights. But as professionals, they brought expertise and experience and mentorship that we desperately needed.

superswordfish 10y ago
I've had the same experience, but only with embedded developers like you described. It probably has more to do with how talent is distributed age-wise in that field.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  The good embedded programmers are awesome, and there's probably something beneficial to the era they developed their skills in. These guys would've started programming in the 70s, when even desktops weren't as powerful as a couple of the chips we got to use in our "embedded" environment. They came out of that era without being spaghetti-coders like a couple of the guys that were, basically, ousted before I got to that office. So they learned to code well within constrained (cycles, memory) environments. As more cycles and memory became available, they just used it more effectively.