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There's an angle to this which never seems to be addressed in articles like this. If someone is fired purely for reasons of cultural fit, i.e., "we didn't like
by nilkn 13y ago
There's an angle to this which never seems to be addressed in articles like this. If someone is fired purely for reasons of cultural fit, i.e., "we didn't like hanging out with him" as another poster puts it here, then surely the person being fired would have felt the lack of fit and would have themselves been looking for another job. It just seems to me that if an employer finds the cultural fit to be bad enough to let someone go, then surely the person being let go would find the cultural fit bad enough to be looking for another job in the background. But in the anecdotes that accompany these articles, the person is always caught completely off guard, as if they didn't see it coming at all.
This poster even laments the great friendships with his coworkers which he felt were wasted upon his firing; how did he have such great friendships if his cultural fit were evidently so terrible as to be fired over it? It's for reasons like this that I always feel these articles are fishy and are leaving out important details.
- asdfologist 13y agoNot everyone is self-aware.
- RougeFemme 13y agoOr the individual is self-aware and feels that it is a good fit, but is unaware that others don't. Or they define cultural fit differently. Or they define it the same way but have different tolerances for a "good" fit. For example, the individual may be comfortable with say, an 80% cultural fit, while the team requires a 99% cultural fit.
- eitally 13y agoOr, they're in a comfort zone and trying to fly under the radar as long as the paychecks keep coming. Not everyone is self-aware... neither is everyone passionate about putting their employer first.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- greenyoda 13y ago"surely the person being fired would have felt the lack of fit and would have themselves been looking for another job" Some people go to work to work, not to hang out with friends. They might not consider it to be such a terrible thing that their coworkers don't want to hang out with them, as long as they can communicate well enough to get their work done. Also, if you have a mortgage and a family to support, you may be less likely to leave a well-paying job just because the culture is suboptimal.
- nilkn 13y ago> as long as they can communicate well enough to get their work done. This implies, though, that their lack of "fit" isn't actually a problem. Are companies really firing very productive developers who are just as technically competent as their peers (if not moreso) just because they aren't socially popular? We're not talking people who are assholes or who never shower or who have obvious and universal social issues; we're just talking people who don't happen to really hit it off, on a BFF sort of level, with their coworkers. I don't see how that practice could be sustained in the long run at all. It seems almost certain, in fact, that the company would hit a hard growth barrier rather quickly if it doesn't overcome this fairly fundamental problem.