6 ms·

Just so I'm getting this straight, in a setting where your entire goal is to make a company want to work with you every day, it's discrimination to turn you dow

by nscalf 7y ago

Just so I'm getting this straight, in a setting where your entire goal is to make a company want to work with you every day, it's discrimination to turn you down because you did not make them want to work with you? Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. I turn down every single person who acts in a way that convinces me I do not want to deal with them day in and day out, and I haven't regretted it once. Sure, we probably miss some good people, but we have a specific culture in place that we all enjoy, and I don't want to feel uncomfortable or have to walk on egg shells around my team. These cries of discrimination are getting a bit out of hand. You may just be rude in an interview, and that will 100% result in me turning you down. It doesn't matter much to me if you're an "Aspie/ADD" or if you just found out your wife cheated on you, I don't want you around me all the time based off the only data point I have. To blame the interviewer for your behavior, whatever the reason, is outrageous. I think interviews aren't the best way to find out if someone is a going to be a good engineer, but to be a good team member, you have to have good interactions with the team.

commandlinefan 7y ago
I know it’s not a popular opinion in today’s environment, but I tend to agree with you… I struggled with social interactions when I was younger, so I worked on getting better at social interactions. I don’t know if I have Asperger’s or ADD, I just know that talking to people makes me uncomfortable and I always feel like I’m doing it “wrong”, but I’ve figured out enough patterns and templates to apply to enough situations that I can fool them into thinking I’m doing it the way other people do. Now, I’m willing to concede that it’s possible that there’s another level of “uncomfortable around people” that I can’t even comprehend (although I also wonder if I and OP are actually “normal” and everybody else goes through this, we just complain about it more). It’s hard for me to believe, but there are lots of things that are hard for me to believe that are nonetheless true. But even if it is, it’s beside the point. I also concede that there may well be people who, due to genetic unluckiness, are doomed to be overweight no matter what they do. They still can’t work as airline stewardesses because weight matter on an airplane, just as some baseline level of social interactions matter in an office environment. If there really are people who are genuinely unable to comprehend the difference between rudeness and politeness, they’re few enough that it’s not fair to everybody else to have to compensate for them.
wysifnwyg 7y ago
Good hiring managers will recognize that everyone doesn't have to like everyone. Work isn't a social club, it's a business in the market of delivering products. If candidates aren't measured on a metric of their capability to deliver and instead is measured on their metric as a drinking buddy, your company needs better managers.
- nscalf 7y ago
  Work actually is a social club. You don't need to love everyone, but you shouldn't feel uncomfortable. If you're unhappy at work, your work will suffer. If you're excited about what you're doing and you have your team's back, then you will deliver more value. Excellent engineers can be a good find, but teams build excellent things. There is a reason everyone doesn't work in isolation.
  - wysifnwyg 7y ago
    Unless you own the company, you don't pick all your managers, coworkers, and clients. It's an exceptionally valuable team skill to be able to work with someone you wouldn't invite out for a beer. Learning to work with different viewpoints and behaviors builds character and makes one more competitive. Effective managers know this.
    - nscalf 7y ago
      You don't need to pick all of your managers, coworkers, and clients. That's the point of vetting a company culture before you join. In general, the culture should be a reflection of a shared ideology for business and interpersonal behavior. There is a ton of room for variety within that, but it pins some underlying important traits. Being a good culture fit does not mean you have to like them so much that you're inviting them out for a beer. And in order to really be a long term competitive company and team, you need to be able to be unified first. If there is significant internal turmoil, or people are unmotivated, uncomfortable, threatened, etc. you will never be competitive. "Building character" is generally code for "deal with this crappy situation", and life is too short to make people miserable. You can get a diverse group of people without making all of them unhappy if you select for people who can work together.
anoncake 7y ago
> I haven't regretted it once Did you know that the problem with discrimination is not that the person doing the discriminating may suffer? Your experiences are quite irrelevant here. > Just so I'm getting this straight, in a setting where your entire goal is to make a company want to work with you every day, it's discrimination to turn you down because you did not make them want to work with you? Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. I turn down every single person who acts in a way that convinces me I do not want to deal with them day in and day out, and I haven't regretted it once. Sure, we probably miss some good people, but we have a specific culture in place that we all enjoy, and I don't want to feel uncomfortable or have to walk on egg shells around my team. I'm sorry that women and blacks make you uncomfortable but they have rights too. You don't mind jumping to conclusions, don't you? > You may just be rude in an interview, No, you clearly don't. > To blame the interviewer for your behavior, whatever the reason, is outrageous. They didn't, they blamed the interviewer for the discrimination. > I think interviews aren't the best way to find out if someone is a going to be a good engineer, Not everyone thinks so, causing systemic discrimination against those bad at selling themselves. > but to be a good team member, you have to have good interactions with the team. During interview situations? I don't think so.
jimbokun 7y ago
"Listen, companies have their own cultures..." Peter Thiel once used "culture fit" to exclude people who liked playing basketball: "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. No PayPal people would ever have used the world “hoops.” Probably no one even knew how to play “hoops.” Basketball would be bad enough. But “hoops?” That guy clearly wouldn’t have fit in. He’d have had to explain to the team why he was going to go play hoops on a Thursday night. And no one would have understood him." https://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay https://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183... Gee, which racial demographic has an affinity for basketball? If you wanted to discriminate based on race, you can always find a "culture" proxy, like a hobby, fashion, speech pattern, etc. to use as an excuse, without citing race explicitly. Or gender. Or class. Or "neuro-diversity". Or almost any trait you want to discriminate against.
- nscalf 7y ago
  This seems like an extreme example, to be clear, I don't think you should determine culture fit based off the word you use to describe basketball. So do you think there should be no thought on if someone will get along well with your team? Or is that counted as discrimination? Should we all just hire the first person who can answer a coding challenge that we run into? That seems like the other extreme end.
shaggyfrog 7y ago
> Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. This is the same reasoning that has been used in the past to deny opportunity: to people of colour, to women, to LGBTQ+... to people who didn't attend the "right" university or college... This kind of active bias is harmful to the candidate, creates liability to the interviewer and the company, and also reinforces monoculture in an industry where being flexible and responsive to change has direct impact on the bottom line. > These cries of discrimination are getting a bit out of hand. I have often heard this from people in real life, from the cisgendered/male/caucasian/heteronormative/neuronormative, as if making space for people who aren't exactly like them is going to drive them into some lower social caste. > You may just be rude in an interview, and that will 100% result in me turning you down. That's fine, and your prerogative. > It doesn't matter much to me if you're an "Aspie/ADD" or if you just found out your wife cheated on you, I don't want you around me all the time based off the only data point I have. Do you and everyone at your organization always present a level-headed, calm, non-confrontational demeanour, or are you or anyone else ever ruffled by anything? Including lack of sleep, lack of caffeine, family crisis, friend crisis, personal crisis, unplanned bill, crashed computer, or anything else big or small? If not, perhaps there are unnecessary risks with making a major judgement based on a single data point. > I think interviews aren't the best way to find out if someone is a going to be a good engineer, but to be a good team member, you have to have good interactions with the team. How are you allowing the candidate the best chance to evaluate if you and your team will have perfect interactions with them?
- nscalf 7y ago
  Expecting a minimum amount of professionalism to join a professional environment is not the same thing as discriminating agains people because they are a part of: women, people of color, LGBTQ+, etc. That's a pretty extreme comparison. It does not lock a work culture into a monoculture or degrade flexibility and responsiveness to change, and it does not directly impact the bottom line, that is a ridiculous leap to make. It actually does the opposite. Having a culture where people are collaborative, professional, and respectful allows you to get things done faster and take feedback and criticism in a more productive manner. > I have often heard this from people in real life, from the cisgendered/male/caucasian/heteronormative/neuronormative, as if making space for people who aren't exactly like them is going to drive them into some lower social caste. There is a significant amount of people crying discrimination for everything being said that they don't love. People are less willing to join in discourse, and people are less willing to disagree about something and remain cordial. There are definitely people who are suffering from discrimination, but there are also people saying they are not succeeded because they are being discriminated against, while they actually suck at what their doing and need to work harder. > Do you and everyone at your organization always present a level-headed, calm, non-confrontational demeanour, or are you or anyone else ever ruffled by anything? Including lack of sleep, lack of caffeine, family crisis, friend crisis, personal crisis, unplanned bill, crashed computer, or anything else big or small? If not, perhaps there are unnecessary risks with making a major judgement based on a single data point. Nope, and no one expects anyone to be at their best 24/7. But if I get 1 hour to talk to you, and in that brief period of time you've shown me that you're rude, then I have to draw from the data points I have available to me. At the end of the day, there are a lot of people and not a lot of data points to make judgements from. This is a competitive environment, you have to be better than the other people being interviewed. If you're not, you don't get the job, even if you're having a bad day. A bad hire is really expensive and damaging to an organization, which makes red flags really important data points. > How are you allowing the candidate the best chance to evaluate if you and your team will have perfect interactions with them? There isn't a really good way to do it, you just give as many people as possible the chance to spend time with the candidate. No one expects all perfect interactions, just positive enough interactions that the team is okay with them. The team takes priority, not the candidate. It doesn't matter if you're smart, the team decides if you're an option to bring on. On top of that, everyone gets this opportunity. It doesn't lean to everyone's strengths, but then some people will do better in the interpersonal parts and worse in the technical parts. There is a reason interviews involve multiple stages and multiple types of assessment. None of this is perfect, and you don't have to be perfect to get hired. You have to be good enough to enough people, and you have to be better than the other options.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
> companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit". > Sure, we probably miss some good people, but we have a specific culture in place that we all enjoy, and I don't want to feel uncomfortable or have to walk on egg shells around my team. So you'd reject a candidate because of comfort and enjoyment? Even though the candidate could make you tons of money? That's very discouraging. > You may just be rude in an interview, and that will 100% result in me turning you down. It doesn't matter much to me if you're an "Aspie/ADD" There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. A person with Asperger's communicates differently than a person without Asperger's. You chose to interpret that difference as rudeness. Instead of understanding the cause of the differences and adapting to it, you simply eliminated the candidate for the sake of your own comfort. This doesn't matter to you but it should. Especially if you want to claim you don't discriminate based on factors the candidate can't change.
- nscalf 7y ago
  > You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit". Do/would you hire any person who can answer your questions? There are plenty of smart people who are entirely unenjoyable people. Not liking someone is not discrimination. > So you'd reject a candidate because of comfort and enjoyment? Even though the candidate could make you tons of money? That's very discouraging. You seem to be implying that someone who is smart can obviously outperform people who are less smart. A good team is more than smart people, and a successful company is more than smart people. There is a big difference in the effectiveness of teams that are happy versus miserable. If a brilliant individual makes the rest of your team miserable, that's an awful tradeoff. If you think it's okay to do that, that's very discouraging. > There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. A person with Asperger's communicates differently than a person without Asperger's. You chose to interpret that difference as rudeness. Instead of understanding the cause of the differences and adapting to it, you simply eliminated the candidate for the sake of your own comfort. So instead of feeling insulted or threatened due to rude behavior, you should ignore it because it's your fault? If a guy is aggressively hitting on a girl, is it her fault? Should she change her behavior? Of course not. If you behave in a way that diminishes a collaborative work environment, why would the work environment be responsible for just putting up with the way you behave? You don't have to be the life of the party, but you have to at least act professional. If you can't pull that off for a single interview, you probably can't pull it off indefinitely in a professional environment. This does matter to me, but the reality is that not everyone is a good fit for every setting. The whole point of interviewing is to find people who are going to help you move forward in the best way possible, and if you come into an interview and upset everyone you talk to, there are no data points to indicate that you being a smart asshole is going to help us move forward.
TheOperator 7y ago
Well from my perspective if I don't get a job I can just fail to have the money to manage my disability and die. As soon as I read your post about how if you hired a disabled employee, you feel like you might have to walk on egg-shells, well I instantly sympathized with such a gravely serious concern. I notice how much of your post washes the managers hands clean of making these decisions. Not getting hired is the fault of disabled people who are behaving rudely by being incapable of certain things like eye contact. It's the fault of other employees who will quit. You know... that's almost the same rationale used to keep gay people out of the military. It's the COMPANY who wasn't convinced the employee was worth working with. Have you ever had your job threatened because you didn't want to leave early, arrive late, take extra breaks, socialize instead of working, and wanted to work hard because you believed in the companies vision? Or because you didn't want to steal time? Because you wanted to learn your job? Oh man, it really made the other employees not like me. I was pulled aside and told what a bad culture-fit I was being. I was told my co-workers were going to tell my bosses I should be let go because they didn't like me. In the end I bent to the pressure and went half-way, messed up, and got singled out for punishment. At which point the culture I didn't fit changed for the better because everybody felt so damned guilty. In my entire time in the workforce I have never seen "culture-fit" being anything other than vague opaque bullshit used to discriminate against the disadvantaged and hard-working.
blablabla123 7y ago
>Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. "Culture" has been deemed the #1 important in hiring in the startup culture in the last 5 or probably 10 years. Even large old-school companies seem to go for this. The reality is this: just open Glassdoor, a newspaper or talk to people directly and there are always people who can tell you how bad a place is. And if it's not that, then people might be in complete denial, wondering why things don't work, why the company is not able to reach any business or technical goals. The reality is that most workplaces are pretty bad places to be, that's probably also why so many found their own companies or just freelance. That said, places with strong cultures seem really attractive to new employees but the places with the weakest (=non-existing) cultures are usually those where employees get most opportunity to develop and stay the longest.
- nscalf 7y ago
  I have no research to point to, but my personal experience is very different from this. Sure, everywhere has it's own downsides, but that does not mean that a company is either terrible to work for or everything is failing. That's a really naive stance to take, and it's very defeatist. > ... that's probably also why so many found their own companies or just freelance. Fair enough, if you're in a work environment where you feel this way, I suggest trying to find a better work environment, or doing like you said: start a company or freelance. I personally know a lot of places where they have had almost no churn in 5-10 years, they're having a lot of success, and everyone is happy and mission driven. I'm totally willing to say they may be the exception, but don't write off the work environment as a whole. Or do and go find your own thing, but don't just be unhappy.

by nscalf 7y ago

commandlinefan 7y ago

I know it’s not a popular opinion in today’s environment, but I tend to agree with you… I struggled with social interactions when I was younger, so I worked on getting better at social interactions. I don’t know if I have Asperger’s or ADD, I just know that talking to people makes me uncomfortable and I always feel like I’m doing it “wrong”, but I’ve figured out enough patterns and templates to apply to enough situations that I can fool them into thinking I’m doing it the way other people do. Now, I’m willing to concede that it’s possible that there’s another level of “uncomfortable around people” that I can’t even comprehend (although I also wonder if I and OP are actually “normal” and everybody else goes through this, we just complain about it more). It’s hard for me to believe, but there are lots of things that are hard for me to believe that are nonetheless true. But even if it is, it’s beside the point. I also concede that there may well be people who, due to genetic unluckiness, are doomed to be overweight no matter what they do. They still can’t work as airline stewardesses because weight matter on an airplane, just as some baseline level of social interactions matter in an office environment. If there really are people who are genuinely unable to comprehend the difference between rudeness and politeness, they’re few enough that it’s not fair to everybody else to have to compensate for them.

wysifnwyg 7y ago

Good hiring managers will recognize that everyone doesn't have to like everyone. Work isn't a social club, it's a business in the market of delivering products. If candidates aren't measured on a metric of their capability to deliver and instead is measured on their metric as a drinking buddy, your company needs better managers.

nscalf 7y ago
Work actually is a social club. You don't need to love everyone, but you shouldn't feel uncomfortable. If you're unhappy at work, your work will suffer. If you're excited about what you're doing and you have your team's back, then you will deliver more value. Excellent engineers can be a good find, but teams build excellent things. There is a reason everyone doesn't work in isolation.
- wysifnwyg 7y ago
  Unless you own the company, you don't pick all your managers, coworkers, and clients. It's an exceptionally valuable team skill to be able to work with someone you wouldn't invite out for a beer. Learning to work with different viewpoints and behaviors builds character and makes one more competitive. Effective managers know this.
  - nscalf 7y ago
    You don't need to pick all of your managers, coworkers, and clients. That's the point of vetting a company culture before you join. In general, the culture should be a reflection of a shared ideology for business and interpersonal behavior. There is a ton of room for variety within that, but it pins some underlying important traits. Being a good culture fit does not mean you have to like them so much that you're inviting them out for a beer. And in order to really be a long term competitive company and team, you need to be able to be unified first. If there is significant internal turmoil, or people are unmotivated, uncomfortable, threatened, etc. you will never be competitive. "Building character" is generally code for "deal with this crappy situation", and life is too short to make people miserable. You can get a diverse group of people without making all of them unhappy if you select for people who can work together.

anoncake 7y ago

> I haven't regretted it once Did you know that the problem with discrimination is not that the person doing the discriminating may suffer? Your experiences are quite irrelevant here. > Just so I'm getting this straight, in a setting where your entire goal is to make a company want to work with you every day, it's discrimination to turn you down because you did not make them want to work with you? Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. I turn down every single person who acts in a way that convinces me I do not want to deal with them day in and day out, and I haven't regretted it once. Sure, we probably miss some good people, but we have a specific culture in place that we all enjoy, and I don't want to feel uncomfortable or have to walk on egg shells around my team. I'm sorry that women and blacks make you uncomfortable but they have rights too. You don't mind jumping to conclusions, don't you? > You may just be rude in an interview, No, you clearly don't. > To blame the interviewer for your behavior, whatever the reason, is outrageous. They didn't, they blamed the interviewer for the discrimination. > I think interviews aren't the best way to find out if someone is a going to be a good engineer, Not everyone thinks so, causing systemic discrimination against those bad at selling themselves. > but to be a good team member, you have to have good interactions with the team. During interview situations? I don't think so.

jimbokun 7y ago

"Listen, companies have their own cultures..." Peter Thiel once used "culture fit" to exclude people who liked playing basketball: "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. No PayPal people would ever have used the world “hoops.” Probably no one even knew how to play “hoops.” Basketball would be bad enough. But “hoops?” That guy clearly wouldn’t have fit in. He’d have had to explain to the team why he was going to go play hoops on a Thursday night. And no one would have understood him." https://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay https://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183... Gee, which racial demographic has an affinity for basketball? If you wanted to discriminate based on race, you can always find a "culture" proxy, like a hobby, fashion, speech pattern, etc. to use as an excuse, without citing race explicitly. Or gender. Or class. Or "neuro-diversity". Or almost any trait you want to discriminate against.

nscalf 7y ago
This seems like an extreme example, to be clear, I don't think you should determine culture fit based off the word you use to describe basketball. So do you think there should be no thought on if someone will get along well with your team? Or is that counted as discrimination? Should we all just hire the first person who can answer a coding challenge that we run into? That seems like the other extreme end.

shaggyfrog 7y ago

> Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. This is the same reasoning that has been used in the past to deny opportunity: to people of colour, to women, to LGBTQ+... to people who didn't attend the "right" university or college... This kind of active bias is harmful to the candidate, creates liability to the interviewer and the company, and also reinforces monoculture in an industry where being flexible and responsive to change has direct impact on the bottom line. > These cries of discrimination are getting a bit out of hand. I have often heard this from people in real life, from the cisgendered/male/caucasian/heteronormative/neuronormative, as if making space for people who aren't exactly like them is going to drive them into some lower social caste. > You may just be rude in an interview, and that will 100% result in me turning you down. That's fine, and your prerogative. > It doesn't matter much to me if you're an "Aspie/ADD" or if you just found out your wife cheated on you, I don't want you around me all the time based off the only data point I have. Do you and everyone at your organization always present a level-headed, calm, non-confrontational demeanour, or are you or anyone else ever ruffled by anything? Including lack of sleep, lack of caffeine, family crisis, friend crisis, personal crisis, unplanned bill, crashed computer, or anything else big or small? If not, perhaps there are unnecessary risks with making a major judgement based on a single data point. > I think interviews aren't the best way to find out if someone is a going to be a good engineer, but to be a good team member, you have to have good interactions with the team. How are you allowing the candidate the best chance to evaluate if you and your team will have perfect interactions with them?

nscalf 7y ago
Expecting a minimum amount of professionalism to join a professional environment is not the same thing as discriminating agains people because they are a part of: women, people of color, LGBTQ+, etc. That's a pretty extreme comparison. It does not lock a work culture into a monoculture or degrade flexibility and responsiveness to change, and it does not directly impact the bottom line, that is a ridiculous leap to make. It actually does the opposite. Having a culture where people are collaborative, professional, and respectful allows you to get things done faster and take feedback and criticism in a more productive manner. > I have often heard this from people in real life, from the cisgendered/male/caucasian/heteronormative/neuronormative, as if making space for people who aren't exactly like them is going to drive them into some lower social caste. There is a significant amount of people crying discrimination for everything being said that they don't love. People are less willing to join in discourse, and people are less willing to disagree about something and remain cordial. There are definitely people who are suffering from discrimination, but there are also people saying they are not succeeded because they are being discriminated against, while they actually suck at what their doing and need to work harder. > Do you and everyone at your organization always present a level-headed, calm, non-confrontational demeanour, or are you or anyone else ever ruffled by anything? Including lack of sleep, lack of caffeine, family crisis, friend crisis, personal crisis, unplanned bill, crashed computer, or anything else big or small? If not, perhaps there are unnecessary risks with making a major judgement based on a single data point. Nope, and no one expects anyone to be at their best 24/7. But if I get 1 hour to talk to you, and in that brief period of time you've shown me that you're rude, then I have to draw from the data points I have available to me. At the end of the day, there are a lot of people and not a lot of data points to make judgements from. This is a competitive environment, you have to be better than the other people being interviewed. If you're not, you don't get the job, even if you're having a bad day. A bad hire is really expensive and damaging to an organization, which makes red flags really important data points. > How are you allowing the candidate the best chance to evaluate if you and your team will have perfect interactions with them? There isn't a really good way to do it, you just give as many people as possible the chance to spend time with the candidate. No one expects all perfect interactions, just positive enough interactions that the team is okay with them. The team takes priority, not the candidate. It doesn't matter if you're smart, the team decides if you're an option to bring on. On top of that, everyone gets this opportunity. It doesn't lean to everyone's strengths, but then some people will do better in the interpersonal parts and worse in the technical parts. There is a reason interviews involve multiple stages and multiple types of assessment. None of this is perfect, and you don't have to be perfect to get hired. You have to be good enough to enough people, and you have to be better than the other options.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

> companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit". > Sure, we probably miss some good people, but we have a specific culture in place that we all enjoy, and I don't want to feel uncomfortable or have to walk on egg shells around my team. So you'd reject a candidate because of comfort and enjoyment? Even though the candidate could make you tons of money? That's very discouraging. > You may just be rude in an interview, and that will 100% result in me turning you down. It doesn't matter much to me if you're an "Aspie/ADD" There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. A person with Asperger's communicates differently than a person without Asperger's. You chose to interpret that difference as rudeness. Instead of understanding the cause of the differences and adapting to it, you simply eliminated the candidate for the sake of your own comfort. This doesn't matter to you but it should. Especially if you want to claim you don't discriminate based on factors the candidate can't change.

nscalf 7y ago
> You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit". Do/would you hire any person who can answer your questions? There are plenty of smart people who are entirely unenjoyable people. Not liking someone is not discrimination. > So you'd reject a candidate because of comfort and enjoyment? Even though the candidate could make you tons of money? That's very discouraging. You seem to be implying that someone who is smart can obviously outperform people who are less smart. A good team is more than smart people, and a successful company is more than smart people. There is a big difference in the effectiveness of teams that are happy versus miserable. If a brilliant individual makes the rest of your team miserable, that's an awful tradeoff. If you think it's okay to do that, that's very discouraging. > There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. A person with Asperger's communicates differently than a person without Asperger's. You chose to interpret that difference as rudeness. Instead of understanding the cause of the differences and adapting to it, you simply eliminated the candidate for the sake of your own comfort. So instead of feeling insulted or threatened due to rude behavior, you should ignore it because it's your fault? If a guy is aggressively hitting on a girl, is it her fault? Should she change her behavior? Of course not. If you behave in a way that diminishes a collaborative work environment, why would the work environment be responsible for just putting up with the way you behave? You don't have to be the life of the party, but you have to at least act professional. If you can't pull that off for a single interview, you probably can't pull it off indefinitely in a professional environment. This does matter to me, but the reality is that not everyone is a good fit for every setting. The whole point of interviewing is to find people who are going to help you move forward in the best way possible, and if you come into an interview and upset everyone you talk to, there are no data points to indicate that you being a smart asshole is going to help us move forward.

TheOperator 7y ago

Well from my perspective if I don't get a job I can just fail to have the money to manage my disability and die. As soon as I read your post about how if you hired a disabled employee, you feel like you might have to walk on egg-shells, well I instantly sympathized with such a gravely serious concern. I notice how much of your post washes the managers hands clean of making these decisions. Not getting hired is the fault of disabled people who are behaving rudely by being incapable of certain things like eye contact. It's the fault of other employees who will quit. You know... that's almost the same rationale used to keep gay people out of the military. It's the COMPANY who wasn't convinced the employee was worth working with. Have you ever had your job threatened because you didn't want to leave early, arrive late, take extra breaks, socialize instead of working, and wanted to work hard because you believed in the companies vision? Or because you didn't want to steal time? Because you wanted to learn your job? Oh man, it really made the other employees not like me. I was pulled aside and told what a bad culture-fit I was being. I was told my co-workers were going to tell my bosses I should be let go because they didn't like me. In the end I bent to the pressure and went half-way, messed up, and got singled out for punishment. At which point the culture I didn't fit changed for the better because everybody felt so damned guilty. In my entire time in the workforce I have never seen "culture-fit" being anything other than vague opaque bullshit used to discriminate against the disadvantaged and hard-working.

blablabla123 7y ago

>Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. "Culture" has been deemed the #1 important in hiring in the startup culture in the last 5 or probably 10 years. Even large old-school companies seem to go for this. The reality is this: just open Glassdoor, a newspaper or talk to people directly and there are always people who can tell you how bad a place is. And if it's not that, then people might be in complete denial, wondering why things don't work, why the company is not able to reach any business or technical goals. The reality is that most workplaces are pretty bad places to be, that's probably also why so many found their own companies or just freelance. That said, places with strong cultures seem really attractive to new employees but the places with the weakest (=non-existing) cultures are usually those where employees get most opportunity to develop and stay the longest.

nscalf 7y ago
I have no research to point to, but my personal experience is very different from this. Sure, everywhere has it's own downsides, but that does not mean that a company is either terrible to work for or everything is failing. That's a really naive stance to take, and it's very defeatist. > ... that's probably also why so many found their own companies or just freelance. Fair enough, if you're in a work environment where you feel this way, I suggest trying to find a better work environment, or doing like you said: start a company or freelance. I personally know a lot of places where they have had almost no churn in 5-10 years, they're having a lot of success, and everyone is happy and mission driven. I'm totally willing to say they may be the exception, but don't write off the work environment as a whole. Or do and go find your own thing, but don't just be unhappy.