Comment by mohoyt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mohoyt | Hacker News Reader

I understand that these questions can be ridiculous at times. But I think it is worth pointing out 2 things:

1) They may work well for a subset of applicants for a subset of companies. This, to some, is verification that these sorts of problems are a good way of narrowing down the applicant pool. Hence why they're used.

2) From Facebook (or any other employer)'s perspective, it's an incredibly hard job determining who will fit a given job specification. You may be great on paper, but be a total mismatch with regards to company ethos (I'm not saying you are, I'm just citing this as an example). The way (and that's assuming there is a particular way) of differentiating applicants and determining their suitability is not perfect. Different companies do it different ways, and all of this is constantly evolving. The fact that Facebook is using developers to conduct their interviews could be seen as progress to some compared to what there was x years ago in y company. It's never going to be perfect.

The fact that you've moved on from this and done a bunch of great stuff is fantastic. It's Facebook's loss. But instead of just commenting on why their system sucks, and why it didn't work for you, why not make some constructive suggestions on how it might be improved.

In my honest opinion, the way it can be improved is exactly the way my interview last Friday went:

I walked in, and did the introductions. I had two programming problems to solve, but these weren't puzzles. The two questions were fairly simple, that used a lot of basic features of the language they use in this shop.

The first question I couldn't remember the exact function names in the standard library (it's PHP, the stdlib is HUGE and stupid) but the interviewer helped me, and once I had the right functions in place, was easy.

The second question tested OOP knowledge, and again was easy for any actual programmer.

Then, once I'd passed that with flying colours, we moved on to the normal "interview".

This week, I'm going in for a day (paid), to see if I'm a good culture fit, and look at the projects I'll be working on.

I believe this is a brilliant way of interviewing and making sure you get the right candidate. Anyone who can't program will fail instantly (apparently thats a big problem here in Australia?), and then if the rest of the interview goes well, culture fit is actually TESTED (albeit as much as you can test in one day).

I'm looking forward to this place actually :)

I see "culture fit" mentioned so much, but I'm never sure what it actually means. There are many things it could mean, some OK and some downright immoral. So purely for my elucidation, what does culture fit mean to you in this situation?

To me, it's about how my personality meshes with that of the team; How my approach to problems correlates with their expectations. Does that make sense?

It does and that's what I generally understood it to mean. The problem to me is that its so vague that it serves as a blanket justification for denying someone employment based on "gut feeling" or other basically discriminatory practices. It seems like it can also include "is willing to be in the office 12 hrs a day because he has no home life". No one would actually codify this in writing, but I have a feeling these are the types of filters that fall under "culture fit".

Some will (largely correctly) say that if that's the filter they use against me then I wouldn't want to work there in the first place. The problem is that it allows these types of discrimination to feel justified because we all discuss them under the euphemism "culture fit" instead of calling them exactly what they are: blatant discrimination. Personally I think if you have a filter that you would use to disqualify someone, you should be willing to state it plainly.

Culture fit is more generally whether your personality is a mesh with everyone else's personality. It's typically a blanket over everything non-coding in an interview.

For example..

Positives:

  * Person is a go getter, gets things done, doesn't get blocked
  * Person is meticulous, pays careful attention to detail
  * Person is a good communicator, articulating explanations eloquently

Negatives:

  * Person stumbles around an incorrect solution until hints are given
  * Person jumps to conclusion without considering the bigger picture (or the edge cases)
  * Person doesn't seem to get it, or at least can't explain himself/herself well

---------

And this can then be inferred from the technical "coding" question, or in more traditional companies they will ask direct questions (usually known as "behavioral" questions) that focus on just those personality traits.

To give a particular example, at Amazon the "culture fit" of a candidate is how well they adhere to the company's leadership principles:

http://www.amazon.com/Values-Careers-Homepage/b?ie=UTF8&...

It seems like defining it as "personality is a mesh with everyone else's" is exactly the vague proclaimation I am against. While it seems reasonable on the surface, it allows for so much abuse to go unchecked.

Your amazon link seems to be a good way to define "culture fit". All companies should do this instead of keeping it vague.

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