The article is spot on. In tech, cultural fit means one of several things. Some time ago at a company, we were considering candidates when the most senior software developer left. We went through two weeks of interviews, and I recommended we go with the strongest technical candidate because his experience was very obvious. The employer flat out said that he wouldn't fit because he was too old. When I raised my eyebrows he immediately backtracked to say that he meant that the culture was so different, I got out of there as soon as I could. The guy that was eventually hired because he was 'nice' even though his technical skills were weak was fired six weeks into the job and left a mess that took six full days to 'fix', until we discovered the changes he had made to how things were stored in the database without considering the full implications.
I've also had it happen to me that I pass every technical interview, and then when I meet the team, we'll go for lunch and they'll order beer and I get an orange juice. Drinking comes up as a subject and since I don't drink alcohol my lack of craft beer knowledge somehow becomes the subject of my interview. Needless to say, I've always been rejected at these jobs. Another one is hobbies. I've a family and my commute is LONG, to the point that I don't even play PC games anymore. Hobbies come up, I have none, and I have no intention of lying to get the job. I've learned since that these are companies I don't want to work for. I've gotten along with everyone at every job I've had, so I'm not intimidated by these, but every one I've had has been utterly pointless.
It's tough on an interview to get a feel for how a person is in day-to-day conversation. So the interviewers are looking for areas of common interest to talk about. If they are young, they may have a limited repertoire of topics that usually work; if you shut down all of their ideas for conversation, I hope you at least tried to come up with some topics of your own. Otherwise, you won't have a conversation, and they won't get a feel for you, and that's a bad thing.
I don't know if you've ever actually said "I don't have hobbies" in an interview, but that could likely come off as negative. Your hobbies are your kids, or your house, or reading, or cooking, or watching TV, or whatever you do with your time at home. And all of those are at least something that might start a conversation, which is the whole point. Hell, even saying "I used to play PC games, here are the classics I liked" could be a conversation starter.
I understand not drinking and not playing video games, but saying that you have no hobbies would be pretty weird in an interview. They're just trying to get to know you. Hopefully you follow it up with some personal detail that distinguishes you from a robot.
Talking about a hobby as if you still do it, in order to get the job and provide for your family, is not a lie anyone sane would say matters. Next time, don't sweat it.
If beer is an interview subject, the "brogrammer" culture has gotten out of hand. Now what, the three-martini lunch of the 1950s? (See "Mad Men".) No wonder we see so much crap code.
Yep, I've always believes that there are times when you find yourself in a place you shouldn't be in. It isn't their fault and it isn't your fault, just different people who don't mesh and it's best to admit to it and walk away.
The cultural fit thing can be important in that a negative nancy can seriously cause problems in a group, to the point of people leaving due to getting such a negative view of management/business over time from the constant negativity.
It's a hard thing because there are definitely people you don't want to hire due to 'fit', but it's so hard to get it even fairly right.
Not to sound insulting, though this might be, but without knowing more details I'm going to assume you're failing at the soft interview questions. In an industry where creativity is just as important as engineering knowledge, it's absolutely critical that you nail your soft interview questions.
Don't be afraid or insulted by them, OWN them. Spend time this weekend thinking about what exactly your hobbies are. You definitely have them, even if it's spending time cleaning up baby mess. Think about things that bring a smile to your face and can project to others what your passions are in life.
Never lie and it bothers me that some replies below mention that as an option. However, do MARKET yourself.
The reason these interviewers are mentioning craft-beer to you is because they're trying to get inside your head and see what makes you tick. Beer is an easy way in SF to connect with a lot of people. So yea, no one cares you don't like beer, and I know plenty of people don't drink at all. I promise that that's not why you're not getting an offer. :)
I would immediately hire you - just based on what I read. Seriously. I hate stereotypes, and not allowing people to differ from the average.
I also don't drink alcohol, and I don't watch TV or sports. Every time someone says something cryptic I assume it's baseball-related, and I'm right about 40% of the time.
Companies have to be very careful how they define cultural fit. If they leave it open, it can impart personal bias that are not at all beneficial to the company.
Maybe "value fit" should be used instead of cultural fit. Do your values align with the core values of the company.
The top NYTimes comment below illustrates some of the warts of a "cultural fit".
"Hiring managers who would never in a million years describe themselves or even privately consider themselves to be racist or sexist or ageist commonly use cultural-fit criteria to perpetrate racism, sexism, or agism in the workplace. I was recently in a meeting with two other managers to compare notes on a group of candidates whom we'd all just interviewed for a mid-level job. My top pick was a supremely well-qualified 45-year-old black woman who outscored all the other candidates on the skills test, was the only one to arrive on time for the interview, and was the only one who dressed professionally for the interview. It's a corporate job in Midtown. She was poised, amiable, and direct during my conversation with her, asked well-informed questions about the work and the company, and she was also the only candidate who sent a thank you letter after the interview. The other two hiring managers - both of whom, incidentally, were white women who were wearing Black Lives Matter pins - didn't think my top candidate "would be a good fit" or "feel comfortable." We hired a young white guy for the gig. He fits in the gang really well at happy hour, but his job performance is extremely poor. My two managerial colleagues have scheduled a meeting for next week to discuss what we're going to do about him. The good candidate is working for someone else now."
And this company that didn't hire the most-competent candidate: Would you say that they are now some how measurably worse-off within the market? At the very least, in relation to a potential competitor that did snag up that candidate?
"Cultural fit" is just another form of discrimination, a currently legal alternative to racism, sexism, and other forms of illegal discrimination in the US to keep the "unliked" and "unwanted" out of jobs. The author acknowledges this, yet still sees fit to add advice for using cultural fit; that weakens the article a bit, but not much.
The reality is "cultural fit" should never be used to make decisions. It is never right, either as a predictor of performance or ethically. Companies and interviewers already have an incredibly difficult time figuring out ways in which to judge qualifications, even when standard tests and procedures are available. To add in this nonsensical idea of "cultural fit," something that can't be measured, quantified, qualified, or identified, and to make that a selection criteria for applicants not only shirks the duty to hire the most qualified, but gives the company and interviewers an unchallengeable way to reject applicants, an option that otherwise would--and should--be illegal.
tldr: Cultural fit is discrimination, it cannot predict job performance or any otherwise meaningful information related to a candidate's skills and abilities, and should be illegal as its only use is to deny qualified applicants jobs they qualify for.
Cultural fit can definitely impact performance. Imagine a luddite working for a biotechnology company, or an anarchist working for the government, or a muslim working for an atheist non-profit. These people would never find the motivation to perform better than the absolute minimum required to keep their jobs because their goals and the goals of the organization are complete opposites. They could even go as far as sabotaging the performance of others by creating a toxic work environment.
Even if what you say could be true, is it a good thing to send our kids to institutions of learning so that they can become arse-licking sycophants? Is that even a conscious decision in parenting?
If you have a crappy attitude I can't do anything to help you there.
If you have the aptitude and your attitude is positive, can-do, willing to learn, we can teach you anything you need to know or you can learn it on the job.
I too worry that "Cultural Fit" is becoming the new "don't like them" excuse of the day. I try hard to hire people who think about problems differently than myself or other members of my team. My hope is to get as many angles as possible to see problems from so we together as a team can find solutions that might not have been obvious if each of us has a homogeneous view driven by some bogus "cultural fit".
What I know about my life is I was born with almost none of the skills I leverage every day. From the ability to walk and talk, I've had to learn it all. I feel focusing too much on fit and skills is like judging a baby on how cute it is. Basically useless.
Cultural Fit is, in fact, routinely used to make discriminatory choices that aren't rooted in anything related to what it takes to succeed.
Worse, people like Peter Thiel and Max Levchin celebrate this and encourage other startups not to hire women and not to hire men who are even slightly different than themselves. These are influential people and they're purposefully using their influence to make the world a dramatically worse place. You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm actually understating the amount of discrimination that they encourage.
Good cultural fit is about being able to perform on the team. But most SV cultural fit is about being able to party with the team. It's a different thing.
The good news for founders who aren't bigoted assholes is that this means there's less competition for diverse talent, and if you can help those folks know that they'll feel welcome in your office, they'll be knocking at your door.
I think the key is to define within the company, what the cultural values are, and then talk about how to check if a person is aligned with them or not.
At the company I work for, we value creativity, independence and taking ownership and responsibility of one's work. It sounds generic but it's not - people who like structured workplaces and process, just wither and don't succeed. So we try to assess that in interviews, and we took the time actually define what are our values (it goes way beyond this example).
Over time we became better at this, and it actually contributed more heterogeneous hires. Since you don't have to assess people on your personal chemistry and how much they're like you personally - you have better tools do do that. This approach opened the door to people who fit with the work culture, even though they're not similar to the core "social DNA" of the team, and that's just fine, it works well for everyone.
This strikes me as striving for "cultural fit" at a company that actually knows what its culture is, or at least what it wants its culture to be. That could genuinely help -- but the actual list seems like the important part. Without the list, it's just finding somebody everyone wants to be friends with.
The examples in the articles are obviously bad choices though. Cultural fit should be about work behaviour, not what you do in your free time. Whether someone likes sports or whiskey shouldn't matter.
Whether they prefer to have large meetings vs one-on-ones is the kind of thing you want to know, but it's probably not a great idea to prioritize that over actual ability.
In my opinion "cultural fit" is important, but it has to be about work culture. For instance: are you comfortable with code reviews (or lack of thereof), coding standards, how are you positioning yourself with respect to pressure, etc.
I overlooked this when joining my current team and I'm already thinking about finding a new place to land!
I wholeheartedly agree with the need to make cultural fit bigger than just "happy hour" fit, but primarily on moral grounds. I haven't seen strong data to make a technical case here.
Do we observe discrepancies between company performance that are correlated with diversity? They say this is observable at the team level in controlled studies, but at the macro level do we see it?
Put another way, if diversity was a strong influence on success, why do elite institutions in banking and tech not appear to exhibit much of it?
Hiring for cultural fit is just laziness, and interviewers should stop using it as a "metric".
Assessing for ability is extremely difficult - in the case of programming positions, technical interview processes either suffer from a large number of false negatives (e.g. the "Google filter") or a large number of false positives (e.g. "this person doesn't know how to write a for loop; how did they get hired?").
Per the article, most interviewers interpret "cultural fit" as "personal fit" - how well do you like the interviewee? The example heuristics (going out for a beer with the candidate, spending a snowy night in an airport together, etc) have very little to do with company culture and very much to do with answering the question: "Do I like this person?".
Any 4 year old can tell when they like somebody. It's one of the easiest things in the world for a human being to assess.
Technical ability, on the other hand, is one of the hardest things in the world for human beings to asses, at least in the context of an interview. Assessing for "cultural fit" - which on the face of it makes perfect sense as a hiring metric - devolves into a way to avoid doing something difficult (assess technical ability) by doing something easy (assess personal affinity).
For most high-exec types, cultural fit is one of the only excuses to justify their position and achievements.
The technical barriers for these jobs are very small, but as corporations have a self-reinforcing cronyist culture, "acting and being part of the wolves" is the most important thing.
Not only will qualified people not get a chance, but many sectors end up collapsing or getting stuck. For example, for a decent "banker", it wouldnt be hard to predict events in 07-09.
This is exactly right. Corporations are pyramids, where each rung feeds the higher rung. Consequently, there are plenty of people with the right experience for each promotion. Who gets that promotion? Well, since it generally doesn't matter, it's decided politically.
I was once let go from a company for "just not being a good fit" after landing them a successful contract with bigTechCo here in the bay area and earning them over $1mm in services.
Further, they had showed me that my bonus was going to be over $27K one three separate occasions, then they let me go before having to pay me the bonus because I had to be actually employed there to receive my share of the money earned from me doing 100% of the work.
People should not be able to be fired for "not being a good fit" they should have concrete documented issues on which to fire someone.
I think of my work in terms of seeing unexplored areas to go with software (e.g. support self-insight or personal growth). I prefer to work with people having a similar perspective and aesthetic sensibility. A lot of the examples in this article seemed absurd to me - fit or misfit because of your preferred sports teams?
As a Myers-Briggs "intuitive", maybe I "fit" with people having a similar outlook and values, while "sensory" folks fit with people who've had similar experiences and hobbies. I wonder if similarities in this dimension dominates the other MBTI dimensions in accounting for fit (e.g. introversion/extroversion, thinking/feeling, perceiving/judging).
Any research on this? Seems like a worthwhile question.
When interviewing, one of things I deliberately look for is people who are not like the current team. People who are not a "cultural fit", whatever that even means.
I need people with different ideas, different experience; people who will approach the problems in a different way, fill in the blind spots and vulnerabilities the current team has.
There's a trade-off to be made, sure, but professional adults can work together with people that are not the same as them, and a team composed of people who think differently and have different approaches and different experience is far more advantageous than a team of people who all think and work in the same way.
The obvious solution is complete freedom of association. (To the extent that "fit" doesn't help companies succeed, it is its own punishment.) But this would make for a short article. It would also make for simple laws, and would prevent busybodies from making other company's hiring practices their business. But we couldn't have that—not in the Land of the Free.
I don't fit in! Then again, I am a genuine feminist, which to me means I am happy to let the missus (who does fit in) focus on her career, which she prefers anyway, while I, as a dad, stay at home and parent the kid(s). Feminism, f* yeah!
All I can do now is wait until they're old enough to learn a thing or two about computers if they are so inclined...
Why did you put "cultural fit" in quotes? Your criterion is just as poorly defined as everyone else's "cultural fit" criteria and, just like theirs, acts as a way to simply exclude people because they're not like you.
I'm often hired exactly because I do not "fit" within the culture, but because I am apparently African American, it becomes important to trial a litmus test.
I think "culture fit" is generally opportunity for both sides to determine if their brands of humor are compatible.
If you cannot laugh with your coworkers, why work there?
A large part of the "human-centric" modality of web design, for instance, involves writing less code and solving human needs. If you do not have hobbies, etc., why participate in what is inherently a social activity? You are writing code for humans, and humans are likely those wherein you will craft and discover solutions.
[+] [-] arenaninja|10 years ago|reply
I've also had it happen to me that I pass every technical interview, and then when I meet the team, we'll go for lunch and they'll order beer and I get an orange juice. Drinking comes up as a subject and since I don't drink alcohol my lack of craft beer knowledge somehow becomes the subject of my interview. Needless to say, I've always been rejected at these jobs. Another one is hobbies. I've a family and my commute is LONG, to the point that I don't even play PC games anymore. Hobbies come up, I have none, and I have no intention of lying to get the job. I've learned since that these are companies I don't want to work for. I've gotten along with everyone at every job I've had, so I'm not intimidated by these, but every one I've had has been utterly pointless.
[+] [-] IvyMike|10 years ago|reply
I don't know if you've ever actually said "I don't have hobbies" in an interview, but that could likely come off as negative. Your hobbies are your kids, or your house, or reading, or cooking, or watching TV, or whatever you do with your time at home. And all of those are at least something that might start a conversation, which is the whole point. Hell, even saying "I used to play PC games, here are the classics I liked" could be a conversation starter.
[+] [-] xaybey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ovi256|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrs235|10 years ago|reply
I think it addresses the issue of not getting an offer because the existing team doesn't connect on as private/personal level.
[+] [-] mreiland|10 years ago|reply
The cultural fit thing can be important in that a negative nancy can seriously cause problems in a group, to the point of people leaving due to getting such a negative view of management/business over time from the constant negativity.
It's a hard thing because there are definitely people you don't want to hire due to 'fit', but it's so hard to get it even fairly right.
[+] [-] jarjoura|10 years ago|reply
Don't be afraid or insulted by them, OWN them. Spend time this weekend thinking about what exactly your hobbies are. You definitely have them, even if it's spending time cleaning up baby mess. Think about things that bring a smile to your face and can project to others what your passions are in life.
Never lie and it bothers me that some replies below mention that as an option. However, do MARKET yourself.
The reason these interviewers are mentioning craft-beer to you is because they're trying to get inside your head and see what makes you tick. Beer is an easy way in SF to connect with a lot of people. So yea, no one cares you don't like beer, and I know plenty of people don't drink at all. I promise that that's not why you're not getting an offer. :)
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notNow|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SixSigma|10 years ago|reply
sounds like he found the faults in your infrastructure, you should be thanking him
[+] [-] paragpatelone|10 years ago|reply
Maybe "value fit" should be used instead of cultural fit. Do your values align with the core values of the company.
The top NYTimes comment below illustrates some of the warts of a "cultural fit".
"Hiring managers who would never in a million years describe themselves or even privately consider themselves to be racist or sexist or ageist commonly use cultural-fit criteria to perpetrate racism, sexism, or agism in the workplace. I was recently in a meeting with two other managers to compare notes on a group of candidates whom we'd all just interviewed for a mid-level job. My top pick was a supremely well-qualified 45-year-old black woman who outscored all the other candidates on the skills test, was the only one to arrive on time for the interview, and was the only one who dressed professionally for the interview. It's a corporate job in Midtown. She was poised, amiable, and direct during my conversation with her, asked well-informed questions about the work and the company, and she was also the only candidate who sent a thank you letter after the interview. The other two hiring managers - both of whom, incidentally, were white women who were wearing Black Lives Matter pins - didn't think my top candidate "would be a good fit" or "feel comfortable." We hired a young white guy for the gig. He fits in the gang really well at happy hour, but his job performance is extremely poor. My two managerial colleagues have scheduled a meeting for next week to discuss what we're going to do about him. The good candidate is working for someone else now."
[+] [-] defen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgkimsal|10 years ago|reply
Beyond lip service, most people are more concerned with their own dept or team vs the entire company.
[+] [-] zo1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joesmo|10 years ago|reply
The reality is "cultural fit" should never be used to make decisions. It is never right, either as a predictor of performance or ethically. Companies and interviewers already have an incredibly difficult time figuring out ways in which to judge qualifications, even when standard tests and procedures are available. To add in this nonsensical idea of "cultural fit," something that can't be measured, quantified, qualified, or identified, and to make that a selection criteria for applicants not only shirks the duty to hire the most qualified, but gives the company and interviewers an unchallengeable way to reject applicants, an option that otherwise would--and should--be illegal.
tldr: Cultural fit is discrimination, it cannot predict job performance or any otherwise meaningful information related to a candidate's skills and abilities, and should be illegal as its only use is to deny qualified applicants jobs they qualify for.
[+] [-] MarcusVorenus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterSear|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrrr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ak39|10 years ago|reply
Even if what you say could be true, is it a good thing to send our kids to institutions of learning so that they can become arse-licking sycophants? Is that even a conscious decision in parenting?
[+] [-] kator|10 years ago|reply
If you have a crappy attitude I can't do anything to help you there.
If you have the aptitude and your attitude is positive, can-do, willing to learn, we can teach you anything you need to know or you can learn it on the job.
I too worry that "Cultural Fit" is becoming the new "don't like them" excuse of the day. I try hard to hire people who think about problems differently than myself or other members of my team. My hope is to get as many angles as possible to see problems from so we together as a team can find solutions that might not have been obvious if each of us has a homogeneous view driven by some bogus "cultural fit".
What I know about my life is I was born with almost none of the skills I leverage every day. From the ability to walk and talk, I've had to learn it all. I feel focusing too much on fit and skills is like judging a baby on how cute it is. Basically useless.
[+] [-] culturalshit|10 years ago|reply
Worse, people like Peter Thiel and Max Levchin celebrate this and encourage other startups not to hire women and not to hire men who are even slightly different than themselves. These are influential people and they're purposefully using their influence to make the world a dramatically worse place. You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm actually understating the amount of discrimination that they encourage.
Good cultural fit is about being able to perform on the team. But most SV cultural fit is about being able to party with the team. It's a different thing.
The good news for founders who aren't bigoted assholes is that this means there's less competition for diverse talent, and if you can help those folks know that they'll feel welcome in your office, they'll be knocking at your door.
[+] [-] jrs235|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvirsky|10 years ago|reply
At the company I work for, we value creativity, independence and taking ownership and responsibility of one's work. It sounds generic but it's not - people who like structured workplaces and process, just wither and don't succeed. So we try to assess that in interviews, and we took the time actually define what are our values (it goes way beyond this example).
Over time we became better at this, and it actually contributed more heterogeneous hires. Since you don't have to assess people on your personal chemistry and how much they're like you personally - you have better tools do do that. This approach opened the door to people who fit with the work culture, even though they're not similar to the core "social DNA" of the team, and that's just fine, it works well for everyone.
[+] [-] rev_bird|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|10 years ago|reply
Whether they prefer to have large meetings vs one-on-ones is the kind of thing you want to know, but it's probably not a great idea to prioritize that over actual ability.
[+] [-] Joky|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hagmonk|10 years ago|reply
Do we observe discrepancies between company performance that are correlated with diversity? They say this is observable at the team level in controlled studies, but at the macro level do we see it?
Put another way, if diversity was a strong influence on success, why do elite institutions in banking and tech not appear to exhibit much of it?
[+] [-] tsmith|10 years ago|reply
Assessing for ability is extremely difficult - in the case of programming positions, technical interview processes either suffer from a large number of false negatives (e.g. the "Google filter") or a large number of false positives (e.g. "this person doesn't know how to write a for loop; how did they get hired?").
Per the article, most interviewers interpret "cultural fit" as "personal fit" - how well do you like the interviewee? The example heuristics (going out for a beer with the candidate, spending a snowy night in an airport together, etc) have very little to do with company culture and very much to do with answering the question: "Do I like this person?".
Any 4 year old can tell when they like somebody. It's one of the easiest things in the world for a human being to assess.
Technical ability, on the other hand, is one of the hardest things in the world for human beings to asses, at least in the context of an interview. Assessing for "cultural fit" - which on the face of it makes perfect sense as a hiring metric - devolves into a way to avoid doing something difficult (assess technical ability) by doing something easy (assess personal affinity).
[+] [-] dataker|10 years ago|reply
The technical barriers for these jobs are very small, but as corporations have a self-reinforcing cronyist culture, "acting and being part of the wolves" is the most important thing.
Not only will qualified people not get a chance, but many sectors end up collapsing or getting stuck. For example, for a decent "banker", it wouldnt be hard to predict events in 07-09.
[+] [-] lordnacho|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|10 years ago|reply
Further, they had showed me that my bonus was going to be over $27K one three separate occasions, then they let me go before having to pay me the bonus because I had to be actually employed there to receive my share of the money earned from me doing 100% of the work.
People should not be able to be fired for "not being a good fit" they should have concrete documented issues on which to fire someone.
[+] [-] kaitai|10 years ago|reply
"Crucially, though, for these gatekeepers, fit was not about a match with organizational values. It was about personal fit."
For all of you defending hiring on fit, which fit are you thinking about?
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] earljwagner|10 years ago|reply
As a Myers-Briggs "intuitive", maybe I "fit" with people having a similar outlook and values, while "sensory" folks fit with people who've had similar experiences and hobbies. I wonder if similarities in this dimension dominates the other MBTI dimensions in accounting for fit (e.g. introversion/extroversion, thinking/feeling, perceiving/judging).
Any research on this? Seems like a worthwhile question.
[+] [-] EliRivers|10 years ago|reply
I need people with different ideas, different experience; people who will approach the problems in a different way, fill in the blind spots and vulnerabilities the current team has.
There's a trade-off to be made, sure, but professional adults can work together with people that are not the same as them, and a team composed of people who think differently and have different approaches and different experience is far more advantageous than a team of people who all think and work in the same way.
[+] [-] lexcorvus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidz|10 years ago|reply
All I can do now is wait until they're old enough to learn a thing or two about computers if they are so inclined...
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DevPad|10 years ago|reply
At previous startup we had guys from: Germany, Russia, US, Romania, Brasil, Ukraine, Philippines.
Our "cultural fit" was just about: Be a Hacker (innovative, open-minded).
[+] [-] nileshtrivedi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|10 years ago|reply
Why did you put "cultural fit" in quotes? Your criterion is just as poorly defined as everyone else's "cultural fit" criteria and, just like theirs, acts as a way to simply exclude people because they're not like you.
[+] [-] raindev|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenerdfiles|10 years ago|reply
I think "culture fit" is generally opportunity for both sides to determine if their brands of humor are compatible.
If you cannot laugh with your coworkers, why work there?
A large part of the "human-centric" modality of web design, for instance, involves writing less code and solving human needs. If you do not have hobbies, etc., why participate in what is inherently a social activity? You are writing code for humans, and humans are likely those wherein you will craft and discover solutions.