16 ms·

How to Hire

274 points by devy 8y ago

clay_the_ripper 8y ago
I feel like articles like this don’t actually say much. “Don’t hire for culture fit” doesn’t mean anything. The author basically says “don’t just hire people you’d want to have a beer with” and then goes on to say that they do hire for cultural fit by looking at their ability to solve problems and overcome challenges...which is culture fit. If your culture is “we hire people not who we like to drink beer with but those who solve problems” well then that’s culture fit isn’t it? Obviously every company is going to hire for cultural fit. Every company has values that they build around to create successful teams. I would never hire anyone that I didn’t think fit in with our team...why would I do that?Some companies value different things than others. So don’t go around saying “we don’t do culture fit”, yes you do, you just define culture fit differently than other businesses because that’s your “culture”.
- michaelt 8y ago
  Although you could argue that everything is culture and hence testing for anything is testing for cultural fit, that would be an unusually expansive definition of "culture fit" - so much so as to make it meaningless.
- goalieca 8y ago
  If you only hire people like you, then you have no diversity. Not having any diversity leads to a company that is less robust. You need dissenting ideas and different personalities to really find the best path forward. Monocultures are a good way to burn out fast.
- wgerard 8y ago
  > I would never hire anyone that I didn’t think fit in with our team...why would I do that? Because you might benefit from having someone with a different perspective in a professional environment. An older parent might not "fit in" with a team of 22 year-old fresh grads, but still provide valuable experience and perspective in a way that an additional 22 year-old might not. You can probably extrapolate how this might also affect women and minorities. Sure, in an ideal world "fit in" means simply "can coexist peacefully with", but in practice it can end up being a dog-whistle phrase (very similarly to "culture fit", which the article alludes to).
  - tensor 8y ago
    Frankly, most of the article was using dog-whistle phrases anyways. They seem to be advocating to hire based on random traits you dream actually mean something, rather than any sort of principled process using data. Yelling "dog-whistle" and redefining the goal posts whenever anyone comments isn't constructive. I suspect that most people use "culture fit" to mean people that share company values, not that they have the same perspective. Where I work, on some teams we explicitly try to hire people with different perspectives, but they still need to "fit" with our company values. And they still need to work with others without causing disruption.
    - wgerard 8y ago
      > I suspect that most people use "culture fit" to mean people that share company values Ah, but there's the dog-whistle-rub: What are the company values? My guess is that they're sufficiently vague, like "works well with others", or "communicates effectively". Sometimes they're not even that opaque, like "work hard, play hard" (I've seen that one repeatedly). Those values are then often used to discredit people based on, frankly, illegal factors like age/race/gender. A friend once shared a story with me from a company they were at where every single woman they interviewed for an open developer position was rejected after the in-person interview because they were "too quiet and wouldn't be a good communicator". The company was otherwise fairly progressive all things considered (I was shocked to hear the name of the company, at least), but biases like these crop up in really unexpected and subtle ways. That's an anecdote obviously and not data, and of course maybe they just got all the quiet people by random chance. But I hope you see how vague criteria like "culture fit" do end up actually being dog-whistles sometimes.
      - philwelch 8y ago
        About this story--was it that they prejudiced all the women they interviewed as quiet, or did they just happen to interview a bunch of women who happened to be quiet because that's what our culture expects of women? I can't imagine Margaret Thatcher ever being called "too quiet and not a good communicator", but there were also a lot of other bad things people said about her. And yeah, if they interviewed a loud, well-spoken woman, and then rejected her because she was too "aggressive", that would definitely hint at bias to me. How do you solve that problem, as an employer? If you're an assertive workplace and you don't want to hire quiet, passive people, do you hire less assertive women anyway and then train them to be more assertive? I can see some logic around that, but you have to actually dig in and reason your way to that idea, and then you have to test it, and if it turns out not working out, then what? These are some hard problems, and assuming bad faith isn't the be-all end-all of talking about it.
- ghaff 8y ago
  It's actually a pretty good article by someone with a lot of experience in the area. >The author basically says “don’t just hire people you’d want to have a beer with” and then goes on to say that they do hire for cultural fit by looking at their ability to solve problems and overcome challenges Those seem pretty different. One is someone I click with at a personal level. The other is someone who can do the sort of work the business needs. I've worked with plenty of people who I didn't especially like but who were clearly good at their jobs. Sure, at some level, there are elements of culture in whether you're a process-driven organization, a let-the-best-idea win, etc. But the standard "not cultural fit" is more code for you're too old, too quiet, don't want to hang with the guys after work...
- jimbokun 8y ago
  Peter Thiel refused to hire someone who liked to play "hoops": "PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. " http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-... You seem to assume everyone agrees that making hiring decisions on factors with zero relevance to doing the work doesn't make sense. Sadly that's not the case.
  - wolco 8y ago
    By hoops do you mean basketball?
    - Buldak 8y ago
      I can imagine Thiel being perturbed by that verbiage.
      - raarts 8y ago
        I don't understand. Please enlighten me?
      - wolco 8y ago
        Ah so using the term hoops disqualified him. I can't say I disagree with the decision.
        jimbokun 8y ago
        He wasn't hiring for an NBA franchise, so what the hell does someone's free time hobbies have to do with the hiring decision?
        wolco 8y ago
        Basketball in someone's free time isn't the issue. Using the term hoops vs basketball is. This can show major cultural differences. Perhap the gap was too wide for Peter.
- aero142 8y ago
  I feel like rhetorical analysis should be a more common school topic and area of academic work. I want to spend more time talking about what a productive discussion looks like and what actually counts as evidence. You are describing a difference of definition. The solution is to define your terms better. When we agree on definitions, we can more on to discussing what our core disagreement is and people should be able to recognize what counts as evidence for that. I think this is well worn territory but seems culturally lost today.
  - jaggederest 8y ago
    Agreed. I feel it missing myself a lot when I'm communicating with people - I will often realize in retrospect that the problem was the definition of terms, not the facts at hand or opinions of the participants. It's galling, and I wish there were a better way to learn such skills.
- kanox 8y ago
  > “Don’t hire for culture fit” doesn’t mean anything. People has such widely varying definitions of "culture fit" that "hire for culture fit" doesn't mean anything either.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Yes. A great company should have an eclectic mix of skin colors, backgrounds, sexes, etc. Diversity is power. But this also includes diversity of thought-- you should have complete liberals, staunch conservatives, atheists, the faithful, etc. You'll need an HR department with a backbone, to ensure everybody understands the importance of being civil. With great diversity comes great (and wide) perspective.
- conanbatt 8y ago
  Great diversity fosters great conflict as well. I heard some studies showed diversity increases productivity but reduces overall happiness.
gz5 8y ago
The article is great but the statement that most folks feel cultural fit is about "hiring people you'd want to have a beer with" doesn't resonate with what I have experienced. Is that how "most people" define "culture fit" in your experience? For example, we do hire for culture fit, but we define culture fit along vectors such as: + How do you attack problems + How do you communicate and collaborate + How do you deal with rainy day scenarios + How do you learn and grow + How do you teach and mentor + What do you need (and not need) from your teammates + What type of work enviro do you thrive in
- tryitnow 8y ago
  In my experience ""hiring people you'd want to have a beer with" is exactly what many people on the business side mean by "cultural fit." I think your definition is true for technical hires for tech firms. For everyone else, the "beer" definition is operative.
  - ng12 8y ago
    I feel like for most devs culture fit means somebody you'd like to write code with. We work in a fundamentally collaborative industry and I think people realize that. The only times I've been worried about somebody's "culture fit" were times when I worried they wouldn't be easy to collaborate with.
- ghaff 8y ago
  As someone else commented, culture fit often seems to end up being a dog whistle. The types of things you mention seem perfectly legitimate. For example, I've advised someone who I knew from a previous employer who I knew needed a lot of structure and direction to not apply to a company that I knew was considerably more... chaotic. If you tell me your company culture is an open office and you do lots of get-togethers in the evening and focus on working together on everything rather than going off and working on problems individually for a while, I'll probably pass.
  - richmarr 8y ago
    > The types of things you mention seem perfectly legitimate. I certainly assume OP's team is well-intentioned, but I'm skeptical that hiring for uniformity of "how do you attack problems" or "how do you learn and grow" is a good idea. My hope is that the OP meant that they test that people can attack problems, and can learn... rather than aiming for the team to do those things homogenously. Personally I'd disassociate those things out of any umbrella assessment of "fit" and just assess them as independent skills during the broader hiring process.
moate 8y ago
I have to say, this article's thesis is not "Stop Hiring for Culture Fit" and more "These are good hiring practices have have worked for me." The title seems to be "How To Hire" with a broad focus. "Culture fit" is mentioned literally once. I know that's the HBR pagename for it, but it's a terrible title.
- bradlys 8y ago
  I'm not sure how many people here read the article. This article should be named, "Anecdotes about being chief talent officer at Netflix".
- deleted 8y ago
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- asdfman123 8y ago
  "I've been successful in my career for various reasons, some of which I may have no control over. Here's an article I wrote as a way to bolster my reputation. Also, we like hiring people who are musicians, because it worked well with this one guy."
  - moate 8y ago
    Have you ever read Moneyball by Michael Lewis? It's about how a baseball team in the early 2000's took a look at market inefficiencies and used it to put together a great team for real cheap. It's like, how is it possible that a multi-billion dollar league was so unable to figure out their hiring process/talent assessment? They have reams of performance data and just needed to apply analysts to it. Whenever people start talking about the best ways to hire, I generally just start thinking about Moneyball and game theory and how most people are just making shit up with no clue why they're succeeding or failing. Every success story is equal parts "I worked real hard" and "There are far too many variables/luck for me to ever possibly be able to account for them objectively" but everyone like to put a narrative on it and be a hero (or cast someone as a villain).
    - asdfman123 8y ago
hrpnk 8y ago
One of the better hiring advice I got while working at a consulting company was to consider hiring a person for a skill or personality trait that does not yet exist within the company. If in doubt whether to hire or not, the existence of such skill/trait would move the decision towards hiring. This way the overall capabilities and knowledge power of the organisation would increase over time - either by hiring top talent or by hiring candidates for their uniqueness.
ng12 8y ago
> He came in for a day of interviews, and everyone loved him. Is this not culture fit?
- tptacek 8y ago
  It is.
deleted 8y ago
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sethrin 8y ago
Hiring is a cargo cult; there are very few people even attempting to be empirical. The cynic in me suggests that people hire based on the last blog post they read about hiring.
- asdfman123 8y ago
  > We always tried to be creative about probing people and their résumés. Bethany once decided to analyze the résumés of our best data-science people for common features. She found that those people shared an avid interest in music. From then on she and her team looked for that quality. She recalls, “We’d get really excited and call out, ‘Hey, I found a guy who plays piano!’” She concluded that such people can easily toggle between their left and right brains—a great skill for data analysis. Gee, it's like they aren't even trying. It's so unscientific I can't take the process seriously at all.
  - nxc18 8y ago
    Totally agree, this bullshit makes me want to scream. People do the same thing with emails. Have a Hotmail account? People assume you're a Luddite even though, in 2018, Hotmail is basically office 365 Outlook, which is actually just as good, if not much better than Gmail. A lot of 2004 attitudes persist long after they have any relevance or predictive power.
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      While I don't disagree that most of HR is cargo cult bullshit, the hotmail signal is real. Having worked in customer support hotmail users really are as dumb as a box of hammers [0]. 0. The usual exceptions for anything human.
      - asdfman123 8y ago
        To avoid this I just use my @aol.com address when applying for technical positions.
cheeze 8y ago
"Culture fit" to me is more of a "am I going to go nuts working with this person" rather than "would I get a beer with them"
BadassFractal 8y ago
Good luck trying to squeeze "how to hire" into 5 small sections like in the article. It's like "how to get rich in 5 sections" or "how to find your life partner in 5 sections". Anybody who's hired for a decade or longer knows how much more nuanced the dance is.
tptacek 8y ago
This is a bit of an annoying title since almost none of the article is about hiring for culture fit; the better title is the current H1 title from the article: "How To Hire".
- sctb 8y ago
  OK!
hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
Several years ago, right here on HN, a Google employee expressed shock that candidates wouldn't bother to open the "red book" and review before showing up for an interview at Google. I had no idea what the "red book" was. Turns out that it's a particular algorithms textbook used by several top universities. That poster was so wrapped up in a particular culture that he was using colloquial slang to refer to expectations. That's about the same time I realized tech hiring is almost entirely about cultural bias. Watching coworkers talk about rejected candidates as if they were morons for simply having a slightly different approach to, say, OOP architecture, further convinced me of this. In my experience, "culture fit", as cited in post-interview discussion, was almost purely code for ageism. Meanwhile, most of the supposedly technical stuff was really culture.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  While I agree with your sentiment about cultural bias, I don't necessarily feel that the red book thing is all that relevant. I live in Europe and I've heard of (and consequently read) the 'red book', though I wouldn't have necessarily called it that.
  - slavik81 8y ago
    Indeed. The OpenGL Programming Guide[1] has been the "Red Book" since it was published in 1997. Everybody knows about the Red Book. More seriously, I have no idea what book you're talking about. Whatever it is you're referring to, it was not the textbook used when I took Data Structures and Algorithms in undergrad (EE), nor when I TA'd the course while doing my master's (CS, Graphics) at another university. It feels a little arbitrary. As an EE, I took many classes on the fundamental design and construction of computers and communication networks. That knowledge has been very useful in understanding how my software interacts with the world. I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of trees, graphs and other data structures are weaker than those who spent many courses on them. But the company needs a broad assortment of skills to succeed, so it seems like a bad idea to base hiring heavily on finding people that all have the same talents as the interviewer. Of course, if I need to conform to that mold to pass the interview, that's what I'll do. [1]: http://www.opengl-redbook.com/ http://www.opengl-redbook.com/
amanaplanacanal 8y ago
At the last place I worked, the interview process went like this: Come up with a list of questions. Ask each person the same list in front of a committee, and the committee members individually scored their answers. Total the scores, and recommend the highest scoring person for hiring. Then Management took that recommendation and sometimes did a second round of interviews. Did they hire the best people? Sometimes yes, possibly. It was at least an attempt towards objectivity. Although there certainly was discussion that "we want to hire somebody that is going to fit on the team." Of course the problem with this attitude is that it caters to everybody's built-in biases, leading to exactly the all the gender and other discriminatory outcomes we typically see in IT. I don't think anybody really knows how to do hiring.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
While I think hiring for "culture fit" is amorphous it is useful to understand what sort of cultural mismatches your managers can deal with and which ones they can't. One of the things that people sometimes miss when managing managers is that they all have their strengths and weaknesses in the management domain just like engineers have strengths and weaknesses in their technical domain. So if you have a manager who hasn't learned to prevent someone from always taking over the conversation and driving it, you want to fix that problem before you add someone to their team that tends to do that. Now if you can fix your managers to be good at integrating diverse teams with a variety of interaction styles, then you can hire pretty much anybody into those teams and quality managers will empower them and make them effective. But when was the last time you had an executive that you knew was focused on improving the communications effectiveness of their line managers? The trick is that they (the executives) have to know that the investment will pay off in better management but unless they have experienced it in action they won't have the internal understanding to value it versus the performance management goals they have used their whole career up to that point. The end result is that when someone hires in that the manager can't handle they write it off to "bad culture fit" rather than figure out how to fix the manager and the cycle continues...
tomp 8y ago
misleadingly editorialized HN title, but otherwise a great article.
apple4ever 8y ago
No I will not. Maybe the problem is everybody has a different definition for "culture fit." Mine has nothing to with age or personality style (or race or sex obviously). I've hired plenty of all types of those. But its whether a person will get along with our team, and will interact appropriately. They don't all need to be ongoing, or super talkative, or agree with everything we do, but they must have certain skills to mesh with our team. I've been in situations where there were people who were not culture fits, and I've left jobs where people were brought on board who were not culture fits. I find whether a person fits is much better then their exact skill level or knowledge. Both those can be learned. Fitting in with a culture is harder to learn. Edit: the rest of the article is really good though. Just wanted to address the one point I disagreed with.
- gt_ 8y ago
  The stubbornness to avoid articulating your “culture fit” screams discriminatory hiring practices. “Whether a person will get along with our team, and will interact appropriately” sounds like a great thing to hire for, if you have a broad definition of “appropriate”. Why not just use this language? “Culture fit” strongly suggests you’re limiting yourself to comfortable heuristics that can be the gateway to discriminatory hiring practices. Things like politeness, courtesy, ability to effectively communicate are just simply not a cultural concern. Why are you using that term? How would you differentiate your “culture fit” ideals from the “mono-cultural” standards promoted by alt-right groups? Their articulations of what they mean have nothing to do with visible characteristics like skin color. Granted, it all sounds pretty racist to me, but their explanations sound like they have a lot of overlap with your hiring. agenda. All you need to do here is be specific and there shouldn’t be any problem discerning between the two, right? So, can you explain why I should believe you’re not exercising discriminatory hiring practices?
rhacker 8y ago
We definitely hire for affinity and wanting to work on specific technologies. I've been in a few environments where we get the odd man out and suddenly there is an Ocaml component that only one guy knows how to run...
almostdeadguy 8y ago
Interviews for software engineers are the most nepotistic bullshit and full of every variant of petty bias and discrimination possible. It's absolutely horrible. If I start getting asked about my hobbies in an interview, I walk, and you should too. My personal time is none of your business, and if having to like my hobbies or have them resonate with your project in some completely esoteric way is essential to your hiring criteria, you need to rethink your goofy ass life. I look for a job for the same reasons as every other person: because I have subsistence needs that can only be fulfilled by money, not because my life is so completely harmonious with your company's bullshit mission, and frankly you're a weirdo for making candidates have to lie to you about this. Another thing I'll add is that if you have any input into the hiring process PLEASE try to convince your employer to subsidize training and prioritize that over hiring to a bulleted list of particular technologies a candidate must be familiar with. I can't tell you how many engineers could very easily get up to speed with something new, or perhaps are inexperienced and just need a little guidance and could become incredibly better with the right investment in their training (including many long time employees at your company, I guarantee it). I was lucky enough to take a week course from some very knowledgable instructors at a previous job and everyone I know who took that course was bettered by it. Startups are frankly lying to themselves if they think they hire hyper-qualified people anyways, but the entire concept of professionalized industries that are unwilling to invest in the education and training of their employees is absurd and something we should all adamantly reject.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  I've never been a hiring manager, but I would much rather work next to somebody that had broad experience in IT than one that happen to match the particular checklist of technologies that we happen to be using this month.
- sdegutis 8y ago
  I actually wrote a whole article making a very similar point[0]. Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks this! [0] https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-is-overrated https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-i...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
paulie_a 8y ago
If a candidate passes the fairly simple technical tests all I care about is culture fit. And it's a simple test. Would I want to work with them and would I think my coworkers would (the second being more of a judgement call). I am generally positive on people so that isn't exactly a high mountain to climb.
FlipperBucket 8y ago
> He was working at an Arizona bank, where he was a “programmer,” not a “software developer.” That's an example of nightmarish bureaucracy getting in the way of hiring. Titles don't mean anything in software development. If you don't know that, your notions of what to do or not to do are suspect. > Everyone was arguing until Anthony suddenly said, “Can I speak now?” The room went silent VP or not (lots of software devs that aren't supervisors hold VP titles of Software Dev in various industry), this is an example of a terrible communicator who is less creative than autocratic, due to insecurity. Again, so common an archetype that, the rest of the article feels tainted.
- rsweeney21 8y ago
  Anthony was not a VP when he started. The story she's sharing occurred shortly after he was hired when he was just an individual contributor. I worked for Anthony at Netflix. He's one of the smartest people I've met. Also, Patty was making the exact same point as you on job titles. (Note the quotes.) Netflix didn't care about your title at all when they came recruiting.
- jedberg 8y ago
  I worked with Anthony for years. He's an excellent manager and communicator. I think you're misinterpreting what the article said.
myrandomcomment 8y ago
This. 100%. This is perfect. I just sent it to my CEO.
rsweeney21 8y ago
Patty brings a fresh perspective to hiring and compensation for software engineers. I think she has done a lot to move programmer pay away from "programmers are interchangeable cogs" to "pay based on value to the business". I joined Netflix when Patty was the head of HR. Bethany, who she mentions, was the recruiter that reached out to me. Their recruiting process was masterful and it started with Bethany's first message - "They got you first, but they underestimate how valuable you are." I had joined Microsoft right out of college, worked there for 7 years and was feeling very under appreciated. She had taken the time to look at my LinkedIn profile and write a message tailored for me. She probably used that line on a lot of people in my situation, but it worked! So I opened her message. The rest of the process was like staying at the Ritz Carlton. They treat you like a celebrity. It's a carefully crafted candidate experience. It's really impressive. Side note: Anthony Park was my manager when I joined Netflix. He's hands down the best manager I've ever had and he's brilliant. You should try and work for him at Netflix if you can.
- ken 8y ago
  > "pay based on value to the business" How is this computed? Since almost no programmers have collective bargaining agreements, in practice this seems to mean simply "who can negotiate the best". Frankly, I think I'd rather the industry mature enough that we can be interchangeable cogs. Then we wouldn't spend so much time arguing about meaningless trivia like programming languages or coding style.
  - skrebbel 8y ago
    I think that at Netflix it just means "pay more than anyone else will".
  - rsweeney21 8y ago
    Patty describes what this means in the article.
ewjordan 8y ago
"What most people really mean when they say someone is a good fit culturally is that he or she is someone they’d like to have a beer with." This is never how the companies I've been at treated culture fit interviews. Maybe I've only been at good companies, but typically we're only screening for dealbreakers and red flags, and the "culture fit" interview is little more than a chance to relax the interviewee between grueling tech interviews and have a low-pressure chance to sell them on the company; if they happen to offer up an offensive statement or shoot themselves in the foot, then that's on them. The only situations where I've seen people cut based on culture fit questions, they've done something really odd. Comment on an interviewer's looks. Talk unreasonable shit about current company coworkers or policies, or spill confidential info. Indicate unwillingness to work with people of certain political persuasions. Outright racism or sexism. So on. "Like to have a beer with" is a terrible hiring criteria, even if it might be useful when playing both internal and external politics. But "I'd never be willing to tolerate this personality in everyday work interactions" is a very valid reason to cut someone from consideration, and that should be considered in every interview. Almost every toxic coworker I've come in contact with worked on a team that specifically did tech-only interviews, and didn't take culture into account. YMMV...
RayVR 8y ago
I went through the Netflix hiring process in the summer of 2012. I can assure you that at that time, the hiring process was identical to nearly every tech company I’ve ever talked to. If anything, the interview process for my first job in finance was the most intense and went on for about six months from introduction to offer. The truth is that this article is more marketing and self-promotion than anything else.
graycat 8y ago
We shouldn't neglect to mention If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers as at http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650... And similarly we should not miss the paragraph in the OP: > We always tried to be creative about probing people and their résumés. Bethany once decided to analyze the résumés of our best data-science people for common features. She found that those people shared an avid interest in music. From then on she and her team looked for that quality. She recalls, “We’d get really excited and call out, ‘Hey, I found a guy who plays piano!’” She concluded that such people can easily toggle between their left and right brains—a great skill for data analysis. "Music"!! WOW! On violin I got through the D-major section of the Bach Chaconne. Guess I should have applied to Netflix!!! Then there is the: > Say you need a software engineer. Do you want a senior programmer fluent in the best new techniques in search engine development? Hmm .... My work "in search engine development" is based on some original applied math I derived in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. So, can Netflix advise me if my work is "in the best new techniques"? Hmm. Who in Netflix can (A) give an example of an infinite dimensional Hilbert space, (B) say what the connection with search might be, and (C) review the "best new techniques"? Hmm .... But (A) I've written some C code, but regarded it as like digging a ditch with a teaspoon, (B) never wrote any C++, (C) never touched PHP, (D) never wrote any JavaScript, (E) never used Linux, (F) used only a little, simple CSS, (G) never used an IDE (integrated development environment), (H) never used Python, R, Matlab, etc. But I've done a LOT of scientific, engineering software with lots of algorithms, data structures, etc. I've done a lot in applied statistics and published peer-reviewed original research in mathematical statistics. I hold a Ph.D. in applied math from a world class research university. But, no doubt, I couldn't be hired at Netflix!!!! My one, short, telephone Google interview stopped when I gave the wrong answer to their question "What is your favorite programming language?"; apparently the only correct answer was C++; I said PL/I. I'd still say PL/I. How many recruiters at Google understood the pros and cons of PL/I versus other languages? With all this nonsense, as in many posts in this thread, in hiring for computer programming, I gave up and am doing my own startup. I picked Windows over Linux. On Windows I picked Visual Basic .NET (apparently essentially equivalent to C# but with a different flavor of syntactic sugar), type into my favorite text editor, KEdit with a few hundred macros instead of an IDE, used ASP.NET for the Web pages, used ADO.NET for the SQL Server access, etc. Works fine. If I need Python, etc., then I'll learn it and use it. So far, I have all the software development tools I need. For SPSS, SAS, R, Matlab, etc., my work in statistics has always been too advanced for those packages -- so I wrote my own code. Yup, I wouldn't get hired!!! Flip side: I should be able to compete well with the people Netflix, etc. do hire!!!! If I need to hire for my startup, then I will emphasize first -- technical writing.
trapsta 8y ago
"Google shouldn’t decide the salaries for everybody just because they have more money than God!” - lol

274 points by devy 8y ago

I feel like articles like this don’t actually say much. “Don’t hire for culture fit” doesn’t mean anything. The author basically says “don’t just hire people you’d want to have a beer with” and then goes on to say that they do hire for cultural fit by looking at their ability to solve problems and overcome challenges...which is culture fit. If your culture is “we hire people not who we like to drink beer with but those who solve problems” well then that’s culture fit isn’t it? Obviously every company is going to hire for cultural fit. Every company has values that they build around to create successful teams. I would never hire anyone that I didn’t think fit in with our team...why would I do that?Some companies value different things than others. So don’t go around saying “we don’t do culture fit”, yes you do, you just define culture fit differently than other businesses because that’s your “culture”.

michaelt 8y ago
Although you could argue that everything is culture and hence testing for anything is testing for cultural fit, that would be an unusually expansive definition of "culture fit" - so much so as to make it meaningless.
goalieca 8y ago
If you only hire people like you, then you have no diversity. Not having any diversity leads to a company that is less robust. You need dissenting ideas and different personalities to really find the best path forward. Monocultures are a good way to burn out fast.
wgerard 8y ago
> I would never hire anyone that I didn’t think fit in with our team...why would I do that? Because you might benefit from having someone with a different perspective in a professional environment. An older parent might not "fit in" with a team of 22 year-old fresh grads, but still provide valuable experience and perspective in a way that an additional 22 year-old might not. You can probably extrapolate how this might also affect women and minorities. Sure, in an ideal world "fit in" means simply "can coexist peacefully with", but in practice it can end up being a dog-whistle phrase (very similarly to "culture fit", which the article alludes to).
- tensor 8y ago
  Frankly, most of the article was using dog-whistle phrases anyways. They seem to be advocating to hire based on random traits you dream actually mean something, rather than any sort of principled process using data. Yelling "dog-whistle" and redefining the goal posts whenever anyone comments isn't constructive. I suspect that most people use "culture fit" to mean people that share company values, not that they have the same perspective. Where I work, on some teams we explicitly try to hire people with different perspectives, but they still need to "fit" with our company values. And they still need to work with others without causing disruption.
  - wgerard 8y ago
    > I suspect that most people use "culture fit" to mean people that share company values Ah, but there's the dog-whistle-rub: What are the company values? My guess is that they're sufficiently vague, like "works well with others", or "communicates effectively". Sometimes they're not even that opaque, like "work hard, play hard" (I've seen that one repeatedly). Those values are then often used to discredit people based on, frankly, illegal factors like age/race/gender. A friend once shared a story with me from a company they were at where every single woman they interviewed for an open developer position was rejected after the in-person interview because they were "too quiet and wouldn't be a good communicator". The company was otherwise fairly progressive all things considered (I was shocked to hear the name of the company, at least), but biases like these crop up in really unexpected and subtle ways. That's an anecdote obviously and not data, and of course maybe they just got all the quiet people by random chance. But I hope you see how vague criteria like "culture fit" do end up actually being dog-whistles sometimes.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      About this story--was it that they prejudiced all the women they interviewed as quiet, or did they just happen to interview a bunch of women who happened to be quiet because that's what our culture expects of women? I can't imagine Margaret Thatcher ever being called "too quiet and not a good communicator", but there were also a lot of other bad things people said about her. And yeah, if they interviewed a loud, well-spoken woman, and then rejected her because she was too "aggressive", that would definitely hint at bias to me. How do you solve that problem, as an employer? If you're an assertive workplace and you don't want to hire quiet, passive people, do you hire less assertive women anyway and then train them to be more assertive? I can see some logic around that, but you have to actually dig in and reason your way to that idea, and then you have to test it, and if it turns out not working out, then what? These are some hard problems, and assuming bad faith isn't the be-all end-all of talking about it.
ghaff 8y ago
It's actually a pretty good article by someone with a lot of experience in the area. >The author basically says “don’t just hire people you’d want to have a beer with” and then goes on to say that they do hire for cultural fit by looking at their ability to solve problems and overcome challenges Those seem pretty different. One is someone I click with at a personal level. The other is someone who can do the sort of work the business needs. I've worked with plenty of people who I didn't especially like but who were clearly good at their jobs. Sure, at some level, there are elements of culture in whether you're a process-driven organization, a let-the-best-idea win, etc. But the standard "not cultural fit" is more code for you're too old, too quiet, don't want to hang with the guys after work...
jimbokun 8y ago
Peter Thiel refused to hire someone who liked to play "hoops": "PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. " http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-... You seem to assume everyone agrees that making hiring decisions on factors with zero relevance to doing the work doesn't make sense. Sadly that's not the case.
- wolco 8y ago
  By hoops do you mean basketball?
  - Buldak 8y ago
    I can imagine Thiel being perturbed by that verbiage.
    - raarts 8y ago
      I don't understand. Please enlighten me?
    - wolco 8y ago
      Ah so using the term hoops disqualified him. I can't say I disagree with the decision.
      - jimbokun 8y ago
        He wasn't hiring for an NBA franchise, so what the hell does someone's free time hobbies have to do with the hiring decision?
        wolco 8y ago
        Basketball in someone's free time isn't the issue. Using the term hoops vs basketball is. This can show major cultural differences. Perhap the gap was too wide for Peter.
aero142 8y ago
I feel like rhetorical analysis should be a more common school topic and area of academic work. I want to spend more time talking about what a productive discussion looks like and what actually counts as evidence. You are describing a difference of definition. The solution is to define your terms better. When we agree on definitions, we can more on to discussing what our core disagreement is and people should be able to recognize what counts as evidence for that. I think this is well worn territory but seems culturally lost today.
- jaggederest 8y ago
  Agreed. I feel it missing myself a lot when I'm communicating with people - I will often realize in retrospect that the problem was the definition of terms, not the facts at hand or opinions of the participants. It's galling, and I wish there were a better way to learn such skills.
kanox 8y ago
> “Don’t hire for culture fit” doesn’t mean anything. People has such widely varying definitions of "culture fit" that "hire for culture fit" doesn't mean anything either.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Yes. A great company should have an eclectic mix of skin colors, backgrounds, sexes, etc. Diversity is power. But this also includes diversity of thought-- you should have complete liberals, staunch conservatives, atheists, the faithful, etc. You'll need an HR department with a backbone, to ensure everybody understands the importance of being civil. With great diversity comes great (and wide) perspective.

conanbatt 8y ago
Great diversity fosters great conflict as well. I heard some studies showed diversity increases productivity but reduces overall happiness.

gz5 8y ago

The article is great but the statement that most folks feel cultural fit is about "hiring people you'd want to have a beer with" doesn't resonate with what I have experienced. Is that how "most people" define "culture fit" in your experience? For example, we do hire for culture fit, but we define culture fit along vectors such as: + How do you attack problems + How do you communicate and collaborate + How do you deal with rainy day scenarios + How do you learn and grow + How do you teach and mentor + What do you need (and not need) from your teammates + What type of work enviro do you thrive in

tryitnow 8y ago
In my experience ""hiring people you'd want to have a beer with" is exactly what many people on the business side mean by "cultural fit." I think your definition is true for technical hires for tech firms. For everyone else, the "beer" definition is operative.
- ng12 8y ago
  I feel like for most devs culture fit means somebody you'd like to write code with. We work in a fundamentally collaborative industry and I think people realize that. The only times I've been worried about somebody's "culture fit" were times when I worried they wouldn't be easy to collaborate with.
ghaff 8y ago
As someone else commented, culture fit often seems to end up being a dog whistle. The types of things you mention seem perfectly legitimate. For example, I've advised someone who I knew from a previous employer who I knew needed a lot of structure and direction to not apply to a company that I knew was considerably more... chaotic. If you tell me your company culture is an open office and you do lots of get-togethers in the evening and focus on working together on everything rather than going off and working on problems individually for a while, I'll probably pass.
- richmarr 8y ago
  > The types of things you mention seem perfectly legitimate. I certainly assume OP's team is well-intentioned, but I'm skeptical that hiring for uniformity of "how do you attack problems" or "how do you learn and grow" is a good idea. My hope is that the OP meant that they test that people can attack problems, and can learn... rather than aiming for the team to do those things homogenously. Personally I'd disassociate those things out of any umbrella assessment of "fit" and just assess them as independent skills during the broader hiring process.

moate 8y ago

I have to say, this article's thesis is not "Stop Hiring for Culture Fit" and more "These are good hiring practices have have worked for me." The title seems to be "How To Hire" with a broad focus. "Culture fit" is mentioned literally once. I know that's the HBR pagename for it, but it's a terrible title.

bradlys 8y ago
I'm not sure how many people here read the article. This article should be named, "Anecdotes about being chief talent officer at Netflix".
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asdfman123 8y ago
"I've been successful in my career for various reasons, some of which I may have no control over. Here's an article I wrote as a way to bolster my reputation. Also, we like hiring people who are musicians, because it worked well with this one guy."
- moate 8y ago
  Have you ever read Moneyball by Michael Lewis? It's about how a baseball team in the early 2000's took a look at market inefficiencies and used it to put together a great team for real cheap. It's like, how is it possible that a multi-billion dollar league was so unable to figure out their hiring process/talent assessment? They have reams of performance data and just needed to apply analysts to it. Whenever people start talking about the best ways to hire, I generally just start thinking about Moneyball and game theory and how most people are just making shit up with no clue why they're succeeding or failing. Every success story is equal parts "I worked real hard" and "There are far too many variables/luck for me to ever possibly be able to account for them objectively" but everyone like to put a narrative on it and be a hero (or cast someone as a villain).
  - asdfman123 8y ago

hrpnk 8y ago

One of the better hiring advice I got while working at a consulting company was to consider hiring a person for a skill or personality trait that does not yet exist within the company. If in doubt whether to hire or not, the existence of such skill/trait would move the decision towards hiring. This way the overall capabilities and knowledge power of the organisation would increase over time - either by hiring top talent or by hiring candidates for their uniqueness.

ng12 8y ago

> He came in for a day of interviews, and everyone loved him. Is this not culture fit?

tptacek 8y ago
It is.

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sethrin 8y ago

Hiring is a cargo cult; there are very few people even attempting to be empirical. The cynic in me suggests that people hire based on the last blog post they read about hiring.

asdfman123 8y ago
> We always tried to be creative about probing people and their résumés. Bethany once decided to analyze the résumés of our best data-science people for common features. She found that those people shared an avid interest in music. From then on she and her team looked for that quality. She recalls, “We’d get really excited and call out, ‘Hey, I found a guy who plays piano!’” She concluded that such people can easily toggle between their left and right brains—a great skill for data analysis. Gee, it's like they aren't even trying. It's so unscientific I can't take the process seriously at all.
- nxc18 8y ago
  Totally agree, this bullshit makes me want to scream. People do the same thing with emails. Have a Hotmail account? People assume you're a Luddite even though, in 2018, Hotmail is basically office 365 Outlook, which is actually just as good, if not much better than Gmail. A lot of 2004 attitudes persist long after they have any relevance or predictive power.
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    While I don't disagree that most of HR is cargo cult bullshit, the hotmail signal is real. Having worked in customer support hotmail users really are as dumb as a box of hammers [0]. 0. The usual exceptions for anything human.
    - asdfman123 8y ago
      To avoid this I just use my @aol.com address when applying for technical positions.

cheeze 8y ago

"Culture fit" to me is more of a "am I going to go nuts working with this person" rather than "would I get a beer with them"

BadassFractal 8y ago

Good luck trying to squeeze "how to hire" into 5 small sections like in the article. It's like "how to get rich in 5 sections" or "how to find your life partner in 5 sections". Anybody who's hired for a decade or longer knows how much more nuanced the dance is.

tptacek 8y ago

This is a bit of an annoying title since almost none of the article is about hiring for culture fit; the better title is the current H1 title from the article: "How To Hire".

sctb 8y ago
OK!

hfdgiutdryg 8y ago

Several years ago, right here on HN, a Google employee expressed shock that candidates wouldn't bother to open the "red book" and review before showing up for an interview at Google. I had no idea what the "red book" was. Turns out that it's a particular algorithms textbook used by several top universities. That poster was so wrapped up in a particular culture that he was using colloquial slang to refer to expectations. That's about the same time I realized tech hiring is almost entirely about cultural bias. Watching coworkers talk about rejected candidates as if they were morons for simply having a slightly different approach to, say, OOP architecture, further convinced me of this. In my experience, "culture fit", as cited in post-interview discussion, was almost purely code for ageism. Meanwhile, most of the supposedly technical stuff was really culture.

jplayer01 8y ago
While I agree with your sentiment about cultural bias, I don't necessarily feel that the red book thing is all that relevant. I live in Europe and I've heard of (and consequently read) the 'red book', though I wouldn't have necessarily called it that.
- slavik81 8y ago
  Indeed. The OpenGL Programming Guide[1] has been the "Red Book" since it was published in 1997. Everybody knows about the Red Book. More seriously, I have no idea what book you're talking about. Whatever it is you're referring to, it was not the textbook used when I took Data Structures and Algorithms in undergrad (EE), nor when I TA'd the course while doing my master's (CS, Graphics) at another university. It feels a little arbitrary. As an EE, I took many classes on the fundamental design and construction of computers and communication networks. That knowledge has been very useful in understanding how my software interacts with the world. I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of trees, graphs and other data structures are weaker than those who spent many courses on them. But the company needs a broad assortment of skills to succeed, so it seems like a bad idea to base hiring heavily on finding people that all have the same talents as the interviewer. Of course, if I need to conform to that mold to pass the interview, that's what I'll do. [1]: http://www.opengl-redbook.com/ http://www.opengl-redbook.com/

amanaplanacanal 8y ago

At the last place I worked, the interview process went like this: Come up with a list of questions. Ask each person the same list in front of a committee, and the committee members individually scored their answers. Total the scores, and recommend the highest scoring person for hiring. Then Management took that recommendation and sometimes did a second round of interviews. Did they hire the best people? Sometimes yes, possibly. It was at least an attempt towards objectivity. Although there certainly was discussion that "we want to hire somebody that is going to fit on the team." Of course the problem with this attitude is that it caters to everybody's built-in biases, leading to exactly the all the gender and other discriminatory outcomes we typically see in IT. I don't think anybody really knows how to do hiring.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

While I think hiring for "culture fit" is amorphous it is useful to understand what sort of cultural mismatches your managers can deal with and which ones they can't. One of the things that people sometimes miss when managing managers is that they all have their strengths and weaknesses in the management domain just like engineers have strengths and weaknesses in their technical domain. So if you have a manager who hasn't learned to prevent someone from always taking over the conversation and driving it, you want to fix that problem before you add someone to their team that tends to do that. Now if you can fix your managers to be good at integrating diverse teams with a variety of interaction styles, then you can hire pretty much anybody into those teams and quality managers will empower them and make them effective. But when was the last time you had an executive that you knew was focused on improving the communications effectiveness of their line managers? The trick is that they (the executives) have to know that the investment will pay off in better management but unless they have experienced it in action they won't have the internal understanding to value it versus the performance management goals they have used their whole career up to that point. The end result is that when someone hires in that the manager can't handle they write it off to "bad culture fit" rather than figure out how to fix the manager and the cycle continues...

tomp 8y ago

misleadingly editorialized HN title, but otherwise a great article.

apple4ever 8y ago

No I will not. Maybe the problem is everybody has a different definition for "culture fit." Mine has nothing to with age or personality style (or race or sex obviously). I've hired plenty of all types of those. But its whether a person will get along with our team, and will interact appropriately. They don't all need to be ongoing, or super talkative, or agree with everything we do, but they must have certain skills to mesh with our team. I've been in situations where there were people who were not culture fits, and I've left jobs where people were brought on board who were not culture fits. I find whether a person fits is much better then their exact skill level or knowledge. Both those can be learned. Fitting in with a culture is harder to learn. Edit: the rest of the article is really good though. Just wanted to address the one point I disagreed with.

gt_ 8y ago
The stubbornness to avoid articulating your “culture fit” screams discriminatory hiring practices. “Whether a person will get along with our team, and will interact appropriately” sounds like a great thing to hire for, if you have a broad definition of “appropriate”. Why not just use this language? “Culture fit” strongly suggests you’re limiting yourself to comfortable heuristics that can be the gateway to discriminatory hiring practices. Things like politeness, courtesy, ability to effectively communicate are just simply not a cultural concern. Why are you using that term? How would you differentiate your “culture fit” ideals from the “mono-cultural” standards promoted by alt-right groups? Their articulations of what they mean have nothing to do with visible characteristics like skin color. Granted, it all sounds pretty racist to me, but their explanations sound like they have a lot of overlap with your hiring. agenda. All you need to do here is be specific and there shouldn’t be any problem discerning between the two, right? So, can you explain why I should believe you’re not exercising discriminatory hiring practices?

rhacker 8y ago

We definitely hire for affinity and wanting to work on specific technologies. I've been in a few environments where we get the odd man out and suddenly there is an Ocaml component that only one guy knows how to run...

almostdeadguy 8y ago

Interviews for software engineers are the most nepotistic bullshit and full of every variant of petty bias and discrimination possible. It's absolutely horrible. If I start getting asked about my hobbies in an interview, I walk, and you should too. My personal time is none of your business, and if having to like my hobbies or have them resonate with your project in some completely esoteric way is essential to your hiring criteria, you need to rethink your goofy ass life. I look for a job for the same reasons as every other person: because I have subsistence needs that can only be fulfilled by money, not because my life is so completely harmonious with your company's bullshit mission, and frankly you're a weirdo for making candidates have to lie to you about this. Another thing I'll add is that if you have any input into the hiring process PLEASE try to convince your employer to subsidize training and prioritize that over hiring to a bulleted list of particular technologies a candidate must be familiar with. I can't tell you how many engineers could very easily get up to speed with something new, or perhaps are inexperienced and just need a little guidance and could become incredibly better with the right investment in their training (including many long time employees at your company, I guarantee it). I was lucky enough to take a week course from some very knowledgable instructors at a previous job and everyone I know who took that course was bettered by it. Startups are frankly lying to themselves if they think they hire hyper-qualified people anyways, but the entire concept of professionalized industries that are unwilling to invest in the education and training of their employees is absurd and something we should all adamantly reject.

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amanaplanacanal 8y ago
I've never been a hiring manager, but I would much rather work next to somebody that had broad experience in IT than one that happen to match the particular checklist of technologies that we happen to be using this month.
sdegutis 8y ago
I actually wrote a whole article making a very similar point[0]. Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks this! [0] https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-is-overrated https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-i...

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paulie_a 8y ago

If a candidate passes the fairly simple technical tests all I care about is culture fit. And it's a simple test. Would I want to work with them and would I think my coworkers would (the second being more of a judgement call). I am generally positive on people so that isn't exactly a high mountain to climb.

FlipperBucket 8y ago

> He was working at an Arizona bank, where he was a “programmer,” not a “software developer.” That's an example of nightmarish bureaucracy getting in the way of hiring. Titles don't mean anything in software development. If you don't know that, your notions of what to do or not to do are suspect. > Everyone was arguing until Anthony suddenly said, “Can I speak now?” The room went silent VP or not (lots of software devs that aren't supervisors hold VP titles of Software Dev in various industry), this is an example of a terrible communicator who is less creative than autocratic, due to insecurity. Again, so common an archetype that, the rest of the article feels tainted.

rsweeney21 8y ago
Anthony was not a VP when he started. The story she's sharing occurred shortly after he was hired when he was just an individual contributor. I worked for Anthony at Netflix. He's one of the smartest people I've met. Also, Patty was making the exact same point as you on job titles. (Note the quotes.) Netflix didn't care about your title at all when they came recruiting.
jedberg 8y ago
I worked with Anthony for years. He's an excellent manager and communicator. I think you're misinterpreting what the article said.

myrandomcomment 8y ago

This. 100%. This is perfect. I just sent it to my CEO.

rsweeney21 8y ago

Patty brings a fresh perspective to hiring and compensation for software engineers. I think she has done a lot to move programmer pay away from "programmers are interchangeable cogs" to "pay based on value to the business". I joined Netflix when Patty was the head of HR. Bethany, who she mentions, was the recruiter that reached out to me. Their recruiting process was masterful and it started with Bethany's first message - "They got you first, but they underestimate how valuable you are." I had joined Microsoft right out of college, worked there for 7 years and was feeling very under appreciated. She had taken the time to look at my LinkedIn profile and write a message tailored for me. She probably used that line on a lot of people in my situation, but it worked! So I opened her message. The rest of the process was like staying at the Ritz Carlton. They treat you like a celebrity. It's a carefully crafted candidate experience. It's really impressive. Side note: Anthony Park was my manager when I joined Netflix. He's hands down the best manager I've ever had and he's brilliant. You should try and work for him at Netflix if you can.

ken 8y ago
> "pay based on value to the business" How is this computed? Since almost no programmers have collective bargaining agreements, in practice this seems to mean simply "who can negotiate the best". Frankly, I think I'd rather the industry mature enough that we can be interchangeable cogs. Then we wouldn't spend so much time arguing about meaningless trivia like programming languages or coding style.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  I think that at Netflix it just means "pay more than anyone else will".
- rsweeney21 8y ago
  Patty describes what this means in the article.

ewjordan 8y ago

"What most people really mean when they say someone is a good fit culturally is that he or she is someone they’d like to have a beer with." This is never how the companies I've been at treated culture fit interviews. Maybe I've only been at good companies, but typically we're only screening for dealbreakers and red flags, and the "culture fit" interview is little more than a chance to relax the interviewee between grueling tech interviews and have a low-pressure chance to sell them on the company; if they happen to offer up an offensive statement or shoot themselves in the foot, then that's on them. The only situations where I've seen people cut based on culture fit questions, they've done something really odd. Comment on an interviewer's looks. Talk unreasonable shit about current company coworkers or policies, or spill confidential info. Indicate unwillingness to work with people of certain political persuasions. Outright racism or sexism. So on. "Like to have a beer with" is a terrible hiring criteria, even if it might be useful when playing both internal and external politics. But "I'd never be willing to tolerate this personality in everyday work interactions" is a very valid reason to cut someone from consideration, and that should be considered in every interview. Almost every toxic coworker I've come in contact with worked on a team that specifically did tech-only interviews, and didn't take culture into account. YMMV...

RayVR 8y ago

I went through the Netflix hiring process in the summer of 2012. I can assure you that at that time, the hiring process was identical to nearly every tech company I’ve ever talked to. If anything, the interview process for my first job in finance was the most intense and went on for about six months from introduction to offer. The truth is that this article is more marketing and self-promotion than anything else.

graycat 8y ago

We shouldn't neglect to mention If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers as at http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650... And similarly we should not miss the paragraph in the OP: > We always tried to be creative about probing people and their résumés. Bethany once decided to analyze the résumés of our best data-science people for common features. She found that those people shared an avid interest in music. From then on she and her team looked for that quality. She recalls, “We’d get really excited and call out, ‘Hey, I found a guy who plays piano!’” She concluded that such people can easily toggle between their left and right brains—a great skill for data analysis. "Music"!! WOW! On violin I got through the D-major section of the Bach Chaconne. Guess I should have applied to Netflix!!! Then there is the: > Say you need a software engineer. Do you want a senior programmer fluent in the best new techniques in search engine development? Hmm .... My work "in search engine development" is based on some original applied math I derived in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. So, can Netflix advise me if my work is "in the best new techniques"? Hmm. Who in Netflix can (A) give an example of an infinite dimensional Hilbert space, (B) say what the connection with search might be, and (C) review the "best new techniques"? Hmm .... But (A) I've written some C code, but regarded it as like digging a ditch with a teaspoon, (B) never wrote any C++, (C) never touched PHP, (D) never wrote any JavaScript, (E) never used Linux, (F) used only a little, simple CSS, (G) never used an IDE (integrated development environment), (H) never used Python, R, Matlab, etc. But I've done a LOT of scientific, engineering software with lots of algorithms, data structures, etc. I've done a lot in applied statistics and published peer-reviewed original research in mathematical statistics. I hold a Ph.D. in applied math from a world class research university. But, no doubt, I couldn't be hired at Netflix!!!! My one, short, telephone Google interview stopped when I gave the wrong answer to their question "What is your favorite programming language?"; apparently the only correct answer was C++; I said PL/I. I'd still say PL/I. How many recruiters at Google understood the pros and cons of PL/I versus other languages? With all this nonsense, as in many posts in this thread, in hiring for computer programming, I gave up and am doing my own startup. I picked Windows over Linux. On Windows I picked Visual Basic .NET (apparently essentially equivalent to C# but with a different flavor of syntactic sugar), type into my favorite text editor, KEdit with a few hundred macros instead of an IDE, used ASP.NET for the Web pages, used ADO.NET for the SQL Server access, etc. Works fine. If I need Python, etc., then I'll learn it and use it. So far, I have all the software development tools I need. For SPSS, SAS, R, Matlab, etc., my work in statistics has always been too advanced for those packages -- so I wrote my own code. Yup, I wouldn't get hired!!! Flip side: I should be able to compete well with the people Netflix, etc. do hire!!!! If I need to hire for my startup, then I will emphasize first -- technical writing.

trapsta 8y ago

"Google shouldn’t decide the salaries for everybody just because they have more money than God!” - lol