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.
As a self taught software developer, I struggle with the intellectual aspect of culture fit. On one hand, I have been told that all the stuff I have showcased on sdegutis.com is amazing. But on the other hand, I don't know many algorithms, can't comprehend math more advanced than high school algebra, and what I do know about software took me twice as long to learn it than it normally takes others.
I have found that freelancing avoids even coming to the question of culture fit. Clients don't care what you know or what kind of books you read or where you went to school, they care what you can do. I have been turned down for jobs for not figuring out their algorithms, whereas the one client I have (I'm open to new clients btw) has told me that he's glad that he found me, because I get the job done fast and well and for cheap.
The downside of this is that you're expected to do a perfect job 100% of the time and have to bite every minute that you lose to yak shaving or other problems, whereas if you work for an employer, they are more understanding if it takes a day to solve some stupid Java XML configuration issue.
Well I know fairly small company where people pretty much expected every candidate to be deeply familiar with The Art of Computer Programming Book by Donald Knuth. The even funnier part it was 100% PHP shop.
I googled "red book" and found one by Jung, and one by Mao. I tried adding "computer science" and got one on relational databases, and one on OpenGL.
If knowing "the red book" were so important to Google, you'd think they would make sure their own search engine knew how to find it.
I have no idea which book they're referring to. For red computer science books, the only ones that come to mind are Numerical Recipes (probably not a Google favorite), one version of Appel's compiler book (not really an algorithms book), and perhaps the old edition of AIMA (though on further inspection, it's more brown).
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.
Current management training is that “Culture fit” is a minefield of unconscious bias. It will take time to roll out but you’ll hear this phrase less and less over time. Possibly not much better, a more vogue term is “culture add.”
I would read that as the "red book in algorithms" this is probably because of the famous OpenGL red book, so now we refer to the "fundamental" book in an area as the red book.
In a sense yes its "wrapped up in a particular culture" I guess the culture that exposed me to this "red book" was a CS bachelors that included graphical programming as a course.
Edit: If someone from google said to read the red book as a helper for interviewing I would probably return with "wait you mean the OpenGL book?"
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.
> If I start getting asked about my hobbies in an interview, I walk, and you should too
To be honest, if someone walked out of an interview with me because I asked them "So anything you like doing in your spare time?" I'd probably be glad that they'd saved me some time. A response of "Sorry, but I like to keep my work and personal life separate" is totally reasonable. I spend more time with my deskmates than my partner during the week. I don't care if they're into running/anime/videogames/heavy metal, I just want to know that if I ask them a question they're not going to get up and walk out of the room!
I'm not sure exactly how I feel about talking about hobbies etc. in interviews, both from an interviewer and interviewee perspective.
As an interviewer, you're potentially going to be spending 40 hours a week with this person. You don't really want to hire a robot.
As an interviewee, my private life is none of my employers business. Maybe my hobby is some super kinky shit that I don't really want my employer to know about. There are certainly a lot of things that I do in my own time that I won't talk about at work, some of it because it's not exactly legal and some of it just because I don't really want to deal with my colleagues judging me.
It's useless to pretend though that our work life and private life are firewalled from each other. Our work life does leak into our private life, and vice versa.
Interviews for software engineers are the most nepotistic bullshit and full of every variant of petty bias and discrimination possible.
I'm no special snowflake and I am definitely not a White male and I can say with almost certainty that I haven't been discriminated against in all of the many interviews I've had. I know because I've always gone through recruiters, my resume never went down a "black hole", and my success rate from being submitted to a job to not being rejected (I've taken myself out of the running after getting an offer is high). I'm also not in Silicon Valley.
What training does the company need to provide software developers? All the training I've needed I taught myself. It was for my benefit.
> If I start getting asked about my hobbies in an interview, I walk, and you should too.
Ok so, you're so scarred by bad interviews that an attempt at small talk makes you walk. Fine, your call. But I'll choose what I do when someone wants to talk about light material for a few minutes, thank you very much.
> PLEASE try to convince your employer to subsidize training and prioritize that over hiring
I would add mentorship to this. Even an informal program would be fine, as long as it means hiring more junior candidates who are then mentored (i.e. internally trained) by the more senior staff who were hired partly for this purpose. Even the mentor tends to learn from this arrangement, so everyone benefits.
> Startups are frankly lying to themselves if they think they hire hyper-qualified people anyways
Whether or not that's the case for an early startup, the credibility of such a conceit wears thin as a company grows. Unfortunately, the attitude of "we don't have the resources for training or mentorship" doesn't seem to dissipate, even with dozens of engineers.
The only time when interviewing someone I ask about personal hobbies etc is when the decision was already made. At that point it was simply to get a better sense of the person I will be working with.
When I've been interviewed it was telling when the person didn't realize I was interviewing them also.
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.
> 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
1. We're a professionalized industry? Really? I don't see any licensure outside Texas, any credentials that aren't sheerest fluff, any teeth whatsoever to the ACM's deontological ramblings^W^W Code of Ethics, any etc.
2. For reasons I don't know and which are another topic of discussion entirely, the CS industry is all about high turnover. Career advancement comes less from promotion and more from switching employers. Under these circumstances, if you are a company that employs software engineers, do you really want to make an investment whose returns will mostly be reaped by others, if not by your direct competitors?
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
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.
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.
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”.
> 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).
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. "
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[+] [-] hfdgiutdryg|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sdegutis|7 years ago|reply
I have found that freelancing avoids even coming to the question of culture fit. Clients don't care what you know or what kind of books you read or where you went to school, they care what you can do. I have been turned down for jobs for not figuring out their algorithms, whereas the one client I have (I'm open to new clients btw) has told me that he's glad that he found me, because I get the job done fast and well and for cheap.
The downside of this is that you're expected to do a perfect job 100% of the time and have to bite every minute that you lose to yak shaving or other problems, whereas if you work for an employer, they are more understanding if it takes a day to solve some stupid Java XML configuration issue.
[+] [-] qaq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ken|7 years ago|reply
If knowing "the red book" were so important to Google, you'd think they would make sure their own search engine knew how to find it.
I have no idea which book they're referring to. For red computer science books, the only ones that come to mind are Numerical Recipes (probably not a Google favorite), one version of Appel's compiler book (not really an algorithms book), and perhaps the old edition of AIMA (though on further inspection, it's more brown).
[+] [-] jplayer01|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encoderer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dblohm7|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] griffinheart|7 years ago|reply
In a sense yes its "wrapped up in a particular culture" I guess the culture that exposed me to this "red book" was a CS bachelors that included graphical programming as a course.
Edit: If someone from google said to read the red book as a helper for interviewing I would probably return with "wait you mean the OpenGL book?"
[+] [-] pawelwentpawel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inapis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] almostdeadguy|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maccard|7 years ago|reply
To be honest, if someone walked out of an interview with me because I asked them "So anything you like doing in your spare time?" I'd probably be glad that they'd saved me some time. A response of "Sorry, but I like to keep my work and personal life separate" is totally reasonable. I spend more time with my deskmates than my partner during the week. I don't care if they're into running/anime/videogames/heavy metal, I just want to know that if I ask them a question they're not going to get up and walk out of the room!
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|7 years ago|reply
As an interviewer, you're potentially going to be spending 40 hours a week with this person. You don't really want to hire a robot.
As an interviewee, my private life is none of my employers business. Maybe my hobby is some super kinky shit that I don't really want my employer to know about. There are certainly a lot of things that I do in my own time that I won't talk about at work, some of it because it's not exactly legal and some of it just because I don't really want to deal with my colleagues judging me.
It's useless to pretend though that our work life and private life are firewalled from each other. Our work life does leak into our private life, and vice versa.
[+] [-] scarface74|7 years ago|reply
I'm no special snowflake and I am definitely not a White male and I can say with almost certainty that I haven't been discriminated against in all of the many interviews I've had. I know because I've always gone through recruiters, my resume never went down a "black hole", and my success rate from being submitted to a job to not being rejected (I've taken myself out of the running after getting an offer is high). I'm also not in Silicon Valley.
What training does the company need to provide software developers? All the training I've needed I taught myself. It was for my benefit.
[+] [-] skrebbel|7 years ago|reply
Ok so, you're so scarred by bad interviews that an attempt at small talk makes you walk. Fine, your call. But I'll choose what I do when someone wants to talk about light material for a few minutes, thank you very much.
[+] [-] mmt|7 years ago|reply
I would add mentorship to this. Even an informal program would be fine, as long as it means hiring more junior candidates who are then mentored (i.e. internally trained) by the more senior staff who were hired partly for this purpose. Even the mentor tends to learn from this arrangement, so everyone benefits.
> Startups are frankly lying to themselves if they think they hire hyper-qualified people anyways
Whether or not that's the case for an early startup, the credibility of such a conceit wears thin as a company grows. Unfortunately, the attitude of "we don't have the resources for training or mentorship" doesn't seem to dissipate, even with dozens of engineers.
[+] [-] sdegutis|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-i...
[+] [-] paulie_a|7 years ago|reply
When I've been interviewed it was telling when the person didn't realize I was interviewing them also.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] amanaplanacanal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmirate|7 years ago|reply
1. We're a professionalized industry? Really? I don't see any licensure outside Texas, any credentials that aren't sheerest fluff, any teeth whatsoever to the ACM's deontological ramblings^W^W Code of Ethics, any etc.
2. For reasons I don't know and which are another topic of discussion entirely, the CS industry is all about high turnover. Career advancement comes less from promotion and more from switching employers. Under these circumstances, if you are a company that employs software engineers, do you really want to make an investment whose returns will mostly be reaped by others, if not by your direct competitors?
[+] [-] gz5|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] rsweeney21|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] clay_the_ripper|7 years ago|reply
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”.
[+] [-] wgerard|7 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] jimbokun|7 years ago|reply
"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-...
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.
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
>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...
[+] [-] goalieca|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aero142|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kanox|7 years ago|reply
People has such widely varying definitions of "culture fit" that "hire for culture fit" doesn't mean anything either.
[+] [-] apple4ever|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hrpnk|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sethrin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moate|7 years ago|reply
"Culture fit" is mentioned literally once. I know that's the HBR pagename for it, but it's a terrible title.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ewjordan|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] cheeze|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ng12|7 years ago|reply
Is this not culture fit?
[+] [-] tptacek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amanaplanacanal|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rhacker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RayVR|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] BadassFractal|7 years ago|reply
Anybody who's hired for a decade or longer knows how much more nuanced the dance is.
[+] [-] FlipperBucket|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
I think you're misinterpreting what the article said.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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