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> 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 pers

> 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.
    - wgerard 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'm not sure that either scenario really paints a rosy picture. More on that below. > 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. I'm sure you can find plenty of outspoken women to whom that's happened. > These are some hard problems, and assuming bad faith isn't the be-all end-all of talking about it. I think this is actually why this conversation rubs people the wrong way: I'm not assuming bad faith at all, even though I'm calling "culture fit" out as a bad metric used to discriminate against people. A relatively modern view of gender/racial relations is that it's not exclusively people acting in bad faith - that is, a minority of people are being overtly racist or sexist (though they obviously dominate the headlines). Rather, there's a lot of subtle and unspoken biases that creep into society and result in discrimination even if that wasn't the intended purpose or goal. To go back to your own example, if our culture "expects women to be quiet", and then discriminates against quiet people for jobs, that kinda sucks doesn't it? What are women supposed to do in that scenario? Are they really forced to choose between gainful employment and acting in a societally-approved way?
tetrep 8y ago
> 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. And someone who doesn't do any work might not "fit in" with a team of people who are doing work, but I'm not going to hire them for the sake of !current_culture. There's a reason it's a "culture fit" or "match" and not "culturally identical" or "culturally homogeneous." The phrase as it is is sufficient and can describe a healthy way of hiring people who are compatible with your current team. If we assume our current team has a healthy culture, finding people who are compatible with it, that can effectively perform their professional duties without disrupting the ability of other employees to do the same (and, ideally, improving the ability of others to do the same), is exactly what we're looking for when hiring someone (other than technical aptitude). Sure, it can also be used to illegally or unethically discriminate, but so could any concept you could conceive of to describe "they won't perform well with our current team." Before "not a culture fit" was a popular it was "not a team player."
- philwelch 8y ago
  > And someone who doesn't do any work might not "fit in" with a team of people who are doing work, but I'm not going to hire them for the sake of !current_culture. That's not poor culture fit, that's just being lazy.
- wgerard 8y ago
  > There's a reason it's a "culture fit" or "match" and not "culturally identical" or "culturally homogeneous." The problem, of course, being that they often end up being synonymous. Similarly "family values" is a dog-whistle for "christian values" in US politics, despite them being different phrases. > If we assume our current team has a healthy culture, finding people who are compatible with it, that can effectively perform their professional duties without disrupting the ability of other employees to do the same (and, ideally, improving the ability of others to do the same), is exactly what we're looking for when hiring someone (other than technical aptitude). One can imagine myriad ways that this would be used to reject someone in a really awful manner. To go back to the parent example: Parents often get up early (because their kids get up early) and need to be home at a reasonable hour to meet their kids. A group of fresh grads has no such requirement and might reasonably work from 11-7 every day, whereas the parent might need to work more 8-4. The disruption of course being that they only overlap for 5 hours a day and this could certainly be used as an example of how the parent isn't a good fit for the team. > Sure, it can also be used to illegally or unethically discriminate, but so could any concept you could conceive of to describe "they won't perform well with our current team." Before "not a culture fit" was a popular it was "not a team player." Yes, and we should strive to eliminate them as much as possible. I'm not suggesting that you should hire assholes who don't work, but that your hiring criteria should be much more explicit: "Were they abrasive during the interview?" instead of "do they fit in well at <x company>?" being a very contrived, simple example off the top of my head.
drstewart 8y ago
So you'd be completely fine hiring someone with a personality of Steve Jobs? Can you explain it in a way you aren't using mental gymnastics and/or "dog whistles"?
iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
This depends on your timeline tbh. Short term goals, homogenous team. Long term goals, heterogenous team. The differences should be based on where they get information and inspiration from, not nessesarily their cultural or geographical background.

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.
  - wgerard 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'm not sure that either scenario really paints a rosy picture. More on that below. > 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. I'm sure you can find plenty of outspoken women to whom that's happened. > These are some hard problems, and assuming bad faith isn't the be-all end-all of talking about it. I think this is actually why this conversation rubs people the wrong way: I'm not assuming bad faith at all, even though I'm calling "culture fit" out as a bad metric used to discriminate against people. A relatively modern view of gender/racial relations is that it's not exclusively people acting in bad faith - that is, a minority of people are being overtly racist or sexist (though they obviously dominate the headlines). Rather, there's a lot of subtle and unspoken biases that creep into society and result in discrimination even if that wasn't the intended purpose or goal. To go back to your own example, if our culture "expects women to be quiet", and then discriminates against quiet people for jobs, that kinda sucks doesn't it? What are women supposed to do in that scenario? Are they really forced to choose between gainful employment and acting in a societally-approved way?

tetrep 8y ago

> 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. And someone who doesn't do any work might not "fit in" with a team of people who are doing work, but I'm not going to hire them for the sake of !current_culture. There's a reason it's a "culture fit" or "match" and not "culturally identical" or "culturally homogeneous." The phrase as it is is sufficient and can describe a healthy way of hiring people who are compatible with your current team. If we assume our current team has a healthy culture, finding people who are compatible with it, that can effectively perform their professional duties without disrupting the ability of other employees to do the same (and, ideally, improving the ability of others to do the same), is exactly what we're looking for when hiring someone (other than technical aptitude). Sure, it can also be used to illegally or unethically discriminate, but so could any concept you could conceive of to describe "they won't perform well with our current team." Before "not a culture fit" was a popular it was "not a team player."

philwelch 8y ago
> And someone who doesn't do any work might not "fit in" with a team of people who are doing work, but I'm not going to hire them for the sake of !current_culture. That's not poor culture fit, that's just being lazy.
wgerard 8y ago
> There's a reason it's a "culture fit" or "match" and not "culturally identical" or "culturally homogeneous." The problem, of course, being that they often end up being synonymous. Similarly "family values" is a dog-whistle for "christian values" in US politics, despite them being different phrases. > If we assume our current team has a healthy culture, finding people who are compatible with it, that can effectively perform their professional duties without disrupting the ability of other employees to do the same (and, ideally, improving the ability of others to do the same), is exactly what we're looking for when hiring someone (other than technical aptitude). One can imagine myriad ways that this would be used to reject someone in a really awful manner. To go back to the parent example: Parents often get up early (because their kids get up early) and need to be home at a reasonable hour to meet their kids. A group of fresh grads has no such requirement and might reasonably work from 11-7 every day, whereas the parent might need to work more 8-4. The disruption of course being that they only overlap for 5 hours a day and this could certainly be used as an example of how the parent isn't a good fit for the team. > Sure, it can also be used to illegally or unethically discriminate, but so could any concept you could conceive of to describe "they won't perform well with our current team." Before "not a culture fit" was a popular it was "not a team player." Yes, and we should strive to eliminate them as much as possible. I'm not suggesting that you should hire assholes who don't work, but that your hiring criteria should be much more explicit: "Were they abrasive during the interview?" instead of "do they fit in well at <x company>?" being a very contrived, simple example off the top of my head.

drstewart 8y ago

So you'd be completely fine hiring someone with a personality of Steve Jobs? Can you explain it in a way you aren't using mental gymnastics and/or "dog whistles"?

iovrthoughtthis 8y ago

This depends on your timeline tbh. Short term goals, homogenous team. Long term goals, heterogenous team. The differences should be based on where they get information and inspiration from, not nessesarily their cultural or geographical background.