>Parents, people of religion who don't drink, non-alcoholics. Those are bad but there are also legitimate clashes of "culture fit" and almost every blog writer

>Parents, people of religion who don't drink, non-alcoholics. Those are bad but there are also legitimate clashes of "culture fit" and almost every blog writer that complains about it is leaving it out. For example, consider a software team writing rocket guidance software for NASA or SpaceX. They are very disciplined about bottom-up analysis, 100% code path coverage, proofs of algorithm correctness, etc. However, they interview a candidate that is somewhat of a cowboy coder (a duct tape programmer)[1]. He's smart and competent but he doesn't fit their culture. The team can acknowledge that the duct tape programmers are not inferior to overly cautious and disciplined programmers. The team can also acknowledge that the fast-paced world needs duct programmers. However, they just don't need him on their particular team. If pressed for reason for why they rejected him, it's very easy to fall back on the simple phrase "culture fit" instead of itemizing an inventory of intellectual incompatibilities. Teams can reject candidates for other reasons besides the He's-Not-White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-22-year-old angle. I guess they could add an adjective and say it was "intellectual culture fit" but that phrase isn't commonplace enough that people would instinctively use it. Just consider that some clashes of "culture fit" are intellectual instead of ethnic discrimination and engineers are not always the best at articulating why they rejected candidates for legitimate reasons. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html