“Culture fit” craze is turning tech from innovators to ideological fiefdoms

At a place I worked not too long ago, they fired a guy after two days because he was clearly an extremely huge asshole and stoner, and the reason they gave was that he wasn&#x27;t a good culture fit. But it was just a polite way of saying that they didn&#x27;t want an unkempt, disorderly, drug addict.<p>Although, I must say, he did seem to be a fairly decent developer, as far as I could tell by talking with him over two days.

Coming from 4 years at a startup as emp#1 and looking again in Austin (engineering), if I hear one more time that &quot;they loved you but didn&#x27;t think you would be a good fit&quot; instead of a real reason for missing the cut, I am going to go nuts.

I wrote about why we got rid of cultural fit interview here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9851060#9853911" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9851060#9853911</a><p>a little over a year ago. The short answer was that we couldn&#x27;t find a single thing that this interview helped with.<p>And since then I have yet to hear anyone give a reasonable answer as to what a cultural fit interview provides.<p>I mean by the time you are ready to hire someone, they&#x27;ve met the team and the team has already approved. We&#x27;ve already given them the hard sell on why they should work for us, infact this is what I spend half our initial phone screen doing, just selling the company.<p>Almost all cultural fit interviews seem to be a form of asking: &quot;Can we figure out if this person will dedicate all their waking hours to our company&quot;, and that&#x27;s just really sad.

I think this can be true in some cases; however, it&#x27;s also nice to look for things like: * Does this person think they&#x27;re above grunt work &#x2F; taking out the trash? * Does this person work better in a position where they take on responsibilities as they see fit or would they rather have work given to them?<p>Neither one of those are captured in the &quot;data-driven&quot; hiring process; however, they are key in our particular company&#x27;s culture. And yes... years of experience can be dismissed simply if the candidate thinks they&#x27;re above everyone else.

I&#x27;ve studied programming my whole life. But somehow someone I&#x27;ve never met before can decide I don&#x27;t know how to program after fifteen minutes of questions. Guess I need to go memorize the meaning of &#x27;polymorphism&#x27; again.

I completely understand what he means, but his disdain would have a better effect if he compared the trendy &quot;we don&#x27;t take ourselves too seriously--see? Nerf wars and ping pong!&quot; culture to the drab, grey, cubicle-dominated culture of the past.<p>Companies take note: be a fun place, but protest too much about your culture and risk becoming a weird hive-minded cult.

I can&#x27;t imagine that this issue doesn&#x27;t manifest even more seriously when it comes to race and gender bias.

I&#x27;ve seen very qualified candidates passed over for people with no discernible skill because of &quot;culture fit&quot;.

A longer-form take on this issue: &quot;Inside the Mirrortocracy&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7930430" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7930430</a>

Hasn&#x27;t this always been the case? Companies that carry on the &quot;80s SV hardware startup mantra&quot; (AAPL, along with repeat founders in semi conductor sector) are definitely fiefdoms that reflect the character of the founder.

I mean, the creator of these seems like someone I wouldn&#x27;t want to work with. There is a lot to be said about creating a culture in a company, and grooming said culture, and making sure to preserve aspects of it you see as powerful for your employees...<p>The &quot;culture&quot; of an open source tech shop is vastly different than a typical .Net tech shop - the clients are different, the dress codes are often more strict in the .net shops, the hierarchy and &quot;feel&quot; is far more corporate... Those are different worlds, and trying to stick someone from one into the other inevitably doesn&#x27;t work well... at least not optimally..