Hacker News Reader

Comment by derwiki | Hacker News Reader

'Culture fit' -- the wild card that lets you reject any candidate.

A nebulous description of a vitally important quality - someone who your existing team won't hate. It's one-sided to claim that people only use it to unfairly reject candidates. Being an ahole is something I'd like to see candidates rejected for, but it won't show up in a technical assessment.

> Being an ahole is something I'd like to see candidates rejected for, but it won't show up in a technical assessment.

I'm not sure that shows up in hours of interviews either...especially when most (all?) of that time is spent on "technical assessment"

It filters out the people whose ego won't let them take the test.

And people who don't think tests are a good start to a relationship between an employee and a company.

And people who are getting better offers at better companies.

You'll never know.

You mean it filters out people with too much self respect to jump through hoops to get a shitty start up job.

The idea that culture fit is just a catch-all for personal bias and -ism's recently occurred to me, and kind of freaks me out. Right now I think there are three things I'm most looking for in a quality Sr candidate: restless learning, pair programs well with my team (we do it on all production code), and focuses on solutions not problems. I'm afraid though that "culture fit", especially around pair programming is just a way for me to cop out on someone I don't like, but I can't prove it.

It's a slippery slope if you ask me. If you don't like them, you might not be able to work well with them. What's more unfair -- adding someone to the team who will cause problems because they're qualified -or- rejecting someone who is qualified because your 45 minute evaluation is, "they're not a good fit"? I don't know the answer. But I do know that it's a lot harder to fire a bad fit than to never hire them to begin with.

I expect this to bite me as ageism in ten years, when a 23 y/o Stanford grad will be aghast that I don't spend my evenings playing with MeteorRails.js.

'Culture fit' could be a vicious circle: The more mono-cultural your team becomes, the harder it gets to hire the most talented people. And if everybody just happens to be looking for the same 'culture,' companies that have fallen into that trap end up with higher recruiting and wage costs.

I've learned to be wary of the "Talk about some recent topics in the news" type questions, politics & issues can be surprisingly divisive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com