Is ‘culture fit’ merely a code word for unethical discrimination? | Hacker News Reader

Is ‘culture fit’ merely a code word for unethical discrimination?

78 pointsnoaccount125660 comments

I have been researching hiring in the tech industry and this is the glaring elephant in the room. In the very least, the widespread acceptance of this abstract category opens up a convenient laundering term for abuse. And in reality, it’s glaringly exactly that.

The general HR rhetoric seems to only highlight the problem. If ‘culture fit’ is merely a matter of good/bad attitude, why are we referring to it as “culture?” These are very clearly separate items. The way they are being treated as interchangeable is beyond suspicious to me. “Culture fit” is used in broad contexts while any query is answered with concerns amounting to attitude differences. In a time when “identity” also suffices for “culture”, how can this possibly be reconciled?

I argue it can’t be and this is another shameful chapter in the tech world’s going list of hypocrisies. Prove me wrong.

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As a manager who does a lot of interviews and has run teams with a lot of different working dynamics, culture fit is something I used to describe a collection of social skills and dynamics at play in my team, with the company as a whole, and with our clients. There are a large number of ways people can interact well, and there are a number of specific things an employee might do to make these dynamics strained. If, in the course of an interview, I can identify a large number of these, then I have effectively identified someone who will take up a large portion of my time in coaching & mentoring to smooth out those habits, or who will take up my time in dealing with inter-office conflict. If that's the case, I will turn that person down based on a culture fit and choose another candidate that can present both the technical skills required as well as the soft-skills that allow us all to work more effectively.

This is my interpretation of those terms and how I use it personally. My basis for behavioral traits is based on personal experience as well in working at a large number of companies in various roles, industries, and positions. I don't believe that it is at all discrimination because I'm using my best judgement for who can work most effectively with my team. That's just smart business.

What types of concrete traits/habits do you look for in a candidate? Do you have any examples of traits/habits that wouldn't fit in the with your team, company and clients?

A good example is burst-workers. I've had a number on the team in the past and it inevitably leads to difficulties. In a solo project it may work well for an individual to mess around online for a few hours before cramming in a bunch of work very quickly. You may finish the same amount of work by the end of the day. Unfortunately in my team environment, the small steps made throughout the day affect the rest of the team's progress, our ability to give proper status updates, and foresee challenges.

This alone may not dissuade me from hiring someone, but things like this add up in the negatives column.

To follow up from GPs point I’m in a similar situation and have been doing a lot of interviews recently. We are a fast growing startup, with under 20 people, and tight deadlines (from investors).

A lot of the candidates we’ve interviewed just don’t have the experience working in that sort of environment. We don’t have time to write code perfectly at the moment with pairing, full test coverage, fully TDD, etc. Yes people can learn this, but if you come across as someone who will just spend all day conplaining about that I don’t want you on the team.

Another thing is simple skills like turning up on time. We recently had a couple of on-site interviews (after phone calls) where the candidates turned up more than 30 minutes late, with no good excuse.

Do you consider tardiness or skill level ‘culture fit’? I don’t.

> I don't believe that it is at all discrimination because I'm using my best judgement for who can work most effectively with my team.

That alone certainly isn't sufficient to make the criterion acceptable under US law. Like, for an obvious stupid example, a team full of men who don't think women belong in the workplace doesn't let you reject all the women. This is true even though the female candidate would genuinely be less effective at the job because of this. (And I don't mean to suggest that you think otherwise--I'm just saying that the criterion you give is not sufficient by itself.)

For real, it gets murkier. A team full of kids who grew up rich, and are (like most of us) most comfortable around their own kind? A team that happily and effectively resolves its technical conflicts by yelling insults at each other, and then getting drunk at a bar? This is where the culture wars get fought, and the lawyers make their money...

Behavior is the key. It's not about where you're from, gender, ethnicity, or anything like that. It's about how you communicate and your work habits.

Yelling insults at each other is a perfect example. In some cultures that works, in others it does not.

Where you're from, your gender, and your ethnicity strongly predict how you communicate, your work habits, and everything else about your behavior. Like, the "yelling insults" culture will tend to select for men over women, assuming typical American gender roles.

At some point, the disparate impact of selecting for a behavior may select against a protected class by enough that it becomes illegal. You also have potential to get stuck in a local maximum, where you're hiring the best candidates to work with your existing team, but in doing so excluding a huge chunk of the global candidate pool. I agree that team fit is important, but it comes with a lot of asterisks.

I'm surprised that someone thinks ethnicity or gender is not relevant to cultural fit. Yes it is. How can one not see that it's far more comfortable to hang out with your own culture, even if a latent part of that was a sparsity of blackness?

Does one behave their race or gender away? No.

It certainly can be. At its core, the term basically means oen of three things:

1. We don't like you and we don't know why

2. We don't like you and don't want to tell you why because the reason is against their law/might lead to a lawsuit.

Or finally:

3. We don't like you but want to sugar coat it a bit because we don't want to make you extremely annoyed/upset.

In some cases, that can really be a codeword for discrimination, since telling someone they're not hired because of their race/gender/age/nationality/whatever is against the law. But in other cases, it can often just be that the company has one way of working/prefers one environment and the candidate has another. If someone just doesn't get along with the people already at the company, well that's not necessarily discrimination if they don't get hired by that company.

So yeah, it depends really.

I think most people would rather be told they're a jerk than be told they're incompetent.

In my experience, jerks don't like being told that they're jerks.

YMMV

Yeah... but they really don't like being told they're incompetent.

"Culture fit" doesn't mean incompetent though.

It could be, if you wanna let the person down in the least offensive way. There's no easy way to tell someone they didn't get the job.

Nobody likes being a Jerk regardless of what reality says. But i'll agree, Jerks do seem, well, Jerk(ier) when told so haha

"Cultural fit" means something like "shares our values". That's something like:

conservative compliance vs. going right to the edge of the law

meticulous design and testing vs. move fast and break things

command-and-control vs. self-organization

IM vs. voice calls

9-5 vs. flexible hours blurring work and non-work time

likes the same kind of music as me vs. doesn't

Some of those seem okay to me to consider, and others don't. I don't see a bright line. I'd tend to agree that "cultural fit" with no further explanation tends to mean something bad.

I especially like that most of the things on your list are not ones where there is a "right answer" for all organizations. Some organizations _should_ move fast and break things, others must not. Having worked at Fortune 500 companies running factories with many toxic chemicals that need to be tightly controlled, and travel magazines, and university accounting IT, and startups, and consultancies making websites for restaurant chains, I can tell you from personal experience that the "right answer" for many of these things is different. Most people can work well in some of them, and not in others.

Culture fit certainly isn't just good/bad attitude. It's whether the way people do their jobs is compatible with the other people. Some companies release early and often, while some test thoroughly before releasing. Some have long meetings, some have short standups. Some start work early, some work late into the evening. Any of those styles can work as long as people agree. Considering culture fit means trying to hire people that share the same style so they can work together effectively.

Culture fit is also a way of excluding jerks. You encounter some abrasive, abusive, or misogynistic personalities in tech. People usually don't want to say "this candidate is a jerk", so they use "bad culture fit" as a euphemism. Once the answer is no-hire, the details don't matter anyway.

Building a team that works well together is extremely difficult. Unless you've actually hired dozens of people and seen them either work well as a team or kill productivity with interpersonal conflicts, better not to sit in judgement of people who have.

"Prove" is a high bar. But for example, I once worked in a factory where everyone was cautious with what they said and how they said it (in a way which your question is not, btw), so as not to hurt others' feelings. Another factory, in the very same building, had a culture of saying everything as bluntly as possible, often with profanity involved.

Same industry, same demographic mix, same company even. Very different cultures (which, interestingly enough, both worked well). Then, they merged the two factories into one organization, and you saw that "culture fit" was not at all an abstraction; the first year was very rough for all concerned, and a lot of people quit.

Also, in this case, because it was a bunch of engineers with a similar demographic mix, not a code word for racism or any other unethical practice. It was culture; I can think of no better word for it.

No disagreement here.

"Culture fit" is a lazy term that, at best, means easy compatibility of work style. Normally, though, it means "like me", and from there it's a pretty short road to unethical forms of discrimination.

I would argue that most companies really want/need "culture add" and "values fit". The stated values of the company tend to at least be aspirational and exclusive of things you don't want at your company. But the culture is an emergent aspect of the people who happen to be there, what they're into (good or bad), and how they prefer to interact. If you only want people who fit into that box, you may be numerically growing, but you're stagnant in perspective.

>Prove me wrong.

I can't, I agree with you.

Company "culture" is whatever management decides it is. Unlike real, organic cultures, company cultures are engineered and dictated from the top, and employees don't alter it (as members of organic cultures do) but are merely expected to conform to it. Amazonians didn't create Amazon's culture, collectively, it is literally the cult of Jeff Bezos, and is "peculiar" by mandate.

So "culture fit" is just a meaningless box into which to throw the personal prejudices of whomever is hiring you (or choosing not to hire you) and to provide them with sufficient plausible deniability, because they can't just say they don't hire anyone over 30, or that they would rather not have women or certain ethnicities around, because it makes them uncomfortable.

As a side note related to Amazon's culture...of the people I've worked with that had previously worked for Amazon, the only ones I (or most anyone, for that matter) enjoyed working with were the ones who hated working for Amazon.

So anecdotally, it seems like culture fit for Amazon is largely about what you're willing to put up with. There might be a component of that at a lot of places, but clearly different companies do have very distinct "cultural" differences. Basecamp is certainly no Amazon. The diversity of different criteria among businesses makes me feel like it's not a particularly unethical practice (obviously it can be, but I don't think it is typically), and overall cultural fit would probably make you happier at whatever job you do end up at.

What is an "organic culture"?

I used to think ‘culture fit’ as a reason not to hire someone was nonsense, however, I left an employer not long ago after they refused to deal with someone toxic that was hurting the team attitude. It led to some massive attrition and made me realize there’s certainly something to idea of ‘culture fit’, but I don’t know how it can be assessed so easily over an interview process. This employee actually started off quite well and seemed like a fit at the time but eventually it became clear they lacked the growth mindset we needed. So culture matters, yes, and attitudes affect team balance but I’m not sure that this is the same as a post-interview ‘culture fit’ rejection. In fact, it may actually be a matter of hiring at the right level of seniority to get the job done. That’s not a culture thing so much as knowing what you really need in an employee. You could easily hire someone who just wasn’t what you needed then blame ‘culture fit’ which seems like a bit of a cop out.

I totally agree here, that 'culture fit' in team work is a real thing. Usually a thing that you discover some month later, after the person feels they can be "themselves" and don't need to pretend being nice. If the whole team finds a person toxic, this is very real case of 'culture unfit' and it should be dealt with.

However, I also once faced with a case, when manager didn't want to hire an engineer, because she thought he wasn't 'culture fit', although he was a great engineer. Technical members of hiring committee managed to convince her otherwise and then this person became in a sense the heart of the team, everybody liking him more than anybody else.

So, in my opinion 'culture fit' should always come from within the team a person works in and it should be a collective opinion, not an opinion of a single manager.

I'm a recruiter and have heard this more times than I can remember as the reason given for why a candidate is not suitable.

I think it is simply a convenient, sufficiently vague, unarguable reason to say no.

It's important to understand that people feel very uncomfortable rejecting another person, and in recruiting, companies really prefer not to give any reason at all - this is because they don't want the candidate to come back arguing with the reasons given for the rejection.

So "not a cultural fit" is just an easy way to say no thanks, whilst giving a "reason" that can't be argued with.

It's not discriminatory.

Yeah, but an easy way to say no thanks while giving a reason that can't be argued with is the perfect instrument with which to discriminate. I suspect that lawyers on both sides are noticing this, and that the term is on its way out.

"It's not discriminatory."

Maybe it's not necessarily discriminatory but almost certainly has been in instances. So really it can be either.

I’m turning 50 in two weeks. I get a long with the 20 and 30 year olds at work. My interest tend to align with thiers (movies, politics, tech trends)) thanmost people my age. I associate with them both in and out of work.

In my experience on the hiring side of the equation, recruiters often _demand_ a reason why an applicant was rejected. I'd prefer to diplomatically say they were a poor culture fit rather than explain that they were conceited, had poor english skills, or seemed high maintenance.

"Culture fit" is just too vague and only provides cover for discrimination. Internal discussions/documents should give the detailed reasons (is a jerk, not on time, not a rule follower, etc). If the people/company are uncomfortable with sharing that outside the company, you don't need to say anything more than we didn't choose you. The internal documents are your protection in the case of a law suit.

It's definitely a mixed bag across the industry and even across individuals at the same company.

To some people culture fit might mean "I'd hang out with this person on Sundays." This of course is problematic and can let in all kinds of biases leading to discrimination.

Ideally culture fit is about whether a person can fit in to the processes in place. Do they value testing? Are they comfortable with the level of ambiguity that will be found in their assignments? Etc.

I'm in favor of the latter, but it needs to be evaluated based on direct questioning to limit the impact of biases i.e. "Would you be comfortable being required to have 100% test coverage on the code you write?" I've certainly seen folks come out of an interview confident that someone wouldn't be comfortable with ambiguity just because they said that at their current job they are given detailed specs to implement.

Given the way "culture fit" is commonly misunderstood, we probably need a better term for the latter -- which I agree is important. "Process fit" or something?

That terminology is so much better. I might start floating that around the office.

I’m in a fast-growing small startup. In my experience, there’s no such thing as “culture fit” in a 10-person company, because every single hire is going to change that culture.

To me, it doesn’t matter if the candidate “fits in” with today’s culture, it only matters if I will still want to work at the company after the new person is part of its culture.

If only you could actually predict this from interviews!

As is, all you can do is try to put the candidate in job-like scenarios and evaluate specific “culture” attributes like “is open to criticism” or “listens to collaborators” or “codes with a concern for future readers” or “has a positive attitude toward code reviews”. It’s still much easier to disqualify than to endorse on those criteria. Hiring is hard.

Not only in a startup. I don't remember where I read it but it was "Every time you add a single person to the team, it's not the same team anymore" and I think it sums it up perfectly. Probably also true for people leaving, but maybe a bit less

I have definitely seen a co-worker at my current job use "culture fit" as a way to discriminate.

I personally believe it is a way to discriminate. If you interview someone and you can't give specifics as to why you don't like them other than culture fit, it's something you are scared to say out loud.

You might have read in HN, in many threads, comments from people saying "I would NEVER work in a company that would do such things like X, Y, Z". The other day, the comments were about a company tracking the activity of every employee. Another day was about a company whose business model was invasive ads. Another thread was about a company forbidding work-from-home and expecting everyone to checkin at 8 am sharp. Another was about companies forbidding engineers to work on opensource on their spare time. The list goes on. These are all examples of "culture" in my mind. As one might say "I'll never work there, ever" - there are plenty of people that would and they do indeed. The difference is the "I would fit there". If I know that the company "requires" to work long hours, or doesn't want work from home, or expects you to be on call at any given time, or expect people to be brutally honest with each other - as interviewer, I would be mindful of someone who will not fit these criterias. And many of these criterias are not good or bad - see the being brutally honest vs we are respectful of everyone feeling: it's just that the "wrong fit" would be run over by the organization within weeks and would likely result in the employee to be dismissed. Everyone would lose.

If you're serious about this and this isn't some "change my mind" meme, I'd recommend reading the culture documents of larger companies like Amazon. It's an attempt at standardizing how soft skills are evaluated and hired for. Basically, all interviews are an attempt to discern three things:

1. Can they do the job 2. Will they like the job 3. Will I like working with this person

The third is really where "culture fit" comes in. When you have multiple candidates that qualify for a role, how do you choose between them? You will naturally pick the person you hit it off with the most, which will more than likely be someone like yourself. It is definitely unconscious bias, but I'm not convinced it's unethical discrimination. This is the basis of all hiring ever...not just tech.

People are going to prefer who they choose to prefer. You're not going to build a better team or get better hires by consciously picking people you or the team doesn't want to work with...at least in collaborative fields. To call that unethical is disingenuous.

The way to minimize the influence of "culture fit" is doing more upfront thinking in the "can they do the job" category so you aren't just choosing between two people who both know javascript. Usually the only soft skill I see on a job description is "effective communicator," which is fluff. Think seriously about what it means to contribute to a team, how they contribute, and how you want teams to reach consensus and work together.

I'd say yes. I'm an older engineer. I recently went for an all day onsite interview. Everyone on the team were fresh out of college in their early 20s. We all went out to lunch and everyone talked entirely about video games throughout about which I have no knowledge really. Afterward they told me I was technically solid but not a team fit.

Older engineers (50+) like me are supposed to have retired aleady.

Yeah, it's mostly thinly veiled discrimination and/or "won't put up with a wildly toxic culture".

I've seen it both ways, I was on a hiring committee that interviewed a candidate who was techinically a great hire, but he had a bad personality and kept correcting one of the other interviewers. We didnt hire him because of a culture fit.

I was on another committee one time where the candidate was muslim and had to pray during the four hour onsite technical interview. My boss said we couldn't hire him because he wouldn't be a good culture fit.

One of those teams I stayed on for 2 good years. The other I wish I had quit earlier.

Anecdotal data point: I'm working at a small startup right now, a bit over a dozen people, which is looking at hiring some web developers. It's been an interesting process. We have rejected a good chunk of applicants for culture fit. (And a few for attitude. And very many for not reading the damn job description.)

Here's why:

Most of us, to a T, are furry trash.

We want to hire someone who seems genuinely excited about the job, and kind of excited about us by extension, so we are making a good chunk of our decision based on culture fit.

Some of our interviews have fit right in. They seem ease. Planning some cosplay or other. Others have reacted quite a bit cooler to the atmosphere. (We're immersed pretty deeply in this weird pocket of the permissive California culture, which I figure must be pretty intense to walk into for a job interview if you're not used to it.)

The ethical bit: Both the primary groups we're hiring from, furry and nerdy, are predominately very white and very male. We seem to have a sort of multiplier effect going where both groups have some diversity but just through probability we don't see any applicants who are not the traditional white male programmer. We'd happily welcome anyone who did not match the visual template, who wasn't weirded out by us, but no one really has yet. I'm guessing we're running up against some sort of systemic discrimination, despite the fact that no one involved in the interaction is intentionally discriminating.

Take that all for what you will, I guess.

--Anonymouse

I've worked at several companies and I've never really seen culture fit used in the way that you're describing. In the case of smaller companies and startups, it's generally just boiled down to "Can this person work directly with stakeholders to provide value for the company, and will they take initiative and ownership over their work?"

If you can answer that from a round of interviews, throw away whatever your business is and pivot to that: you’ll print money. More likely, it’s a hunch based on signals and cues.

It’s a lot easier to be confident about a “no” to those questions than a “yes”. Of course it’s subjective and there are probably false negatives, but it’s really the best you can do imo

Culture means something specific: Shared beliefs and behaviors within a social group, but hiring managers or entrepreneurs use "culture" to make up something vague about not liking the candidate. When in fact, saying a candidate is not a culture fit, it should mean the candidate "does not share our social group's beliefs and behaviors"

When I was just beginning to interview, I was taught the "can do, will do, will fit" criteria: does the candidate have the aptitude for the job, are they willing to apply those skills, and can they do so in the context of the current team.

Fast forward a couple years, and I saw "will fit" used sometimes as a blunt instrument for like to hire like. I actually edited "will fit" when I was training others how to effectively interview, as seen in https://t.co/bias . Like tends to hire like, and people will tend to bias favorably towards other people with common backgrounds, customs, and cultural norms. There has to be an active effort made through an org to both be cognizant of this bias before it can be overcome. I haven't seen many companies that we're successful in that effort, unfortunately.

I think so. I work in the government sector, and the culture fit is never more abused than here. Everything is highly political and no matter the office, political ideology, race, gender, etc. if you don’t fit the political culture, you’re out.

Disappointing to see this flagged/removed with no explanation.

too real perhaps

It can be, although I think the root cause is simply the 6-round sudden-death interviews. Social conformity is a major factor there no matter how you slice it.

I have a suspicion that I got passed over about six months ago for a job as a case of "culture fit" discrimination. It also could have been age, or possibly handicap, I'm not sure. But the strongest takeaway was because of the following:

The first person I met was the company recruiter who handed me a neatly printed brochure about the company culture, which detailed about some of the organizations the employees were involved in and how the company contributed toward their volunteering, etc., all very important. It talked about how they gathered after work and generally socialized outside the company. I was surprised that the emphasis was so big that they burned a lot of money having an expensive brochure professionally printed (which I didn't say).

I read over it, was OK with the idea in general, but kinda didn't get it - I volunteer for my church and otherwise, my time is my own. I haven't worked for a company that made that big of a deal out of it and I said so. I asked if she had anything that talked about the technologies they worked with, stack, tools, etc., since there was nothing on the website. I had a good half-hour to wait for the next interviewer, since they had gone into a meeting.

She promptly gave me a lecture about how I shouldn't dismiss the culture just because I don't agree with it and I tried to explain that I just wasn't familiar with such a strong emphasis.

Generally, I feel like I'm pretty flexible - I'll go along with the crowd for a lot of things and if it's too much, I'll gracefully bow out, citing either other commitments or needs. I am occasionally cynical about such things, but I won't say a word unless I know the person I am speaking to well.

Nothing stands out about the rest of the interview other than it was a good opportunity and I felt like I did pretty well, except on the company culture bit.

I can't help but feel they didn't want someone who didn't wholly buy into what they were doing in their off time.

I did have an interview with another entity where the interviewers (there were three) all talked about how passionate (actual word used) about the social causes (all of which I thought were fine and was generally OK with, even though I didn't have much in-depth knowledge of). I refrained from stating that I was passionate (not exactly the right word) about being a good programmer and solving technical issues, but it really is the main thing I worry about.

They gave me 24 hours to think it over and see if I was interested. I passed on that one.

I may be old-school, or just old, but to me the thing about work is that you get The Work done. If The Work is social causes, volunteering, beer-thirty on Friday, whatever, you do The Work first. I'm doing the job to solve technical problems, get paid and learn new things.

Not joining a cult.

My two cents. I'll go get my safety helmet now.

I previously worked for a company that spent $5-10k psychometrically testing each potential hire in 1 on 1 sessions with a psychologist after they had passed an initial interview. The tests were a mix of general IQ (to ensure people actually had suitable mathematic and literary skills needed the role) but also quite a bit of personality testing. The company founders recognised the huge detrimental impact certain personality types could inflict on an organisation. So they spent considerable money and effort to try to detect and reject candidates that were likely to be passive aggressive, too dominating, inflexible etc. They actively favoured candidates that were able to demonstrate aptitude and personality traits aligned with being a team player, even if the candidate was less experienced for role (ie find quality people first, train them if necessary).

This was the best place I have ever worked. Problems (and successes) were shared. Internal conflict was very rare. If one person was overloaded, the team would work out who might be light on work at the moment and could assist. Work hours were very flexible - outputs not inputs were what mattered. We had a lot of autonomy and were encouraged to be creative and take some risks in developing new tools and services.

The employees were from a diverse range of ethnic and religious backgrounds. The male/female ratio was probably around 60/40 for a company of mostly engineers. Age of employee was mixed but favoured younger engineers. The company was a consultancy so it was a place people would work at to gain diverse experience then move on to specialist positions elsewhere. It was rare for older engineers to be looking to gain diversity of experience.

Given the personality types - this meant we had lots of really interesting discussions about different countries and cultures and life experiences. So "culture fit" at this company did not mean "the same as me" other that with respect to: will work hard, is intelligent enough, will be a team player.

Sadly, after a few years of awesome work life, some of the owners wanted to cash out and the company was acquired by a multi-national. The culture of the original company was quickly destroyed. No autonomy, ridiculous levels of authorisation (4-5 just to purchase $500 of IT equipment for example), competition from internal groups stealing clients, very few team players, inputs favoured over outputs (lots of "make work" going on). The transition experience really rammed home how real the Peter Principle is and the drawbacks of tall hierarchical management structures.

"Culture fit" to me means rejecting people that won't work within the organisational structure you are trying to build. Note that it doesn't mean non-team players should always be rejected. If you have a team of individuals that largely work in isolation and prefer to reduce communication to a minimum, hiring a team-oriented person could be detrimental.

As for "culture fit" being used as a cover for discrimination, I'm sure it happens. If someone is discriminating then they will want to cover their arse somehow and "culture fit" is vague enough that it can easily be used for that purpose.

Perhaps "personality fit" would be a better term for what I describe above? Though I have never heard it being used and I suspect a lot of-people in tech like to think that merit matters more and could find "personality fit" to be offensive.

Yes, that, but also just not liking someone. I feel that the sexism and racism in our industry are important parts of a larger pattern, which is simply that if someone doesn’t express ideas the same way you do, or look/act how you think a “nerd” or “hacker” should, then they’re not one. Women and non-white people are likely to get caught in that, but so might a white man who just doesn’t talk in a way that codes as “nerdy”. God forbid if they could be considered a “bro”, the nerd’s mortal enemy.

And so you say they’re not a good fit, and that’s that. It can’t be proven incorrect because culture fit is a nebulous idea to begin with. It’s a catch-all for whatever you don’t like, basically.

It can be. Some companies (famous example:google) use "culture fit" and "share our values" to discriminate based on political views or other criteria which if they were to be specific about it,then they would break multiple employment laws.

But some have that for a good reason. I applied at a tech company recently whose product I am a fan of. Did well on the phone and in person technical interview. But after that, they kept asking how I like to work and how I felt about open office spaces(told them I can deal with it so long as I can put headphones on while doing technical work that needs concentration and that I felt some tasks are best dealt as a team while some should be developed and matured before involving others). Needless to say, I haven't heard back from them. But my point is that even I felt a bit of a cultural incompatibility( I was willing to make it work but they saw it as unworkable I guess).

Frankly, I don't see how a 50 year old person (not myself,I'm in my 20s) can be culturally compatible with people young enough to be his/her grand child. Or how a coder from asia can have the same work culture as west cost americans.

There is this view that the culture and values made all these tech unicorns what they are. Maybe that's true but I keep wondering whether or not the same group of smart people but culturally diverse could have acheived the same goal so long as they all agree to use rationality,communicate openly(in an inclusive way) and agree on what the goal and their role in the organization is.

I like to think silicon valley startups to be more or less as culturally exclusive as 80s era IBM,bell labs or Xerox. Which is why I keep doubting the culture narrative. Smart people make smart companies and smart enough people should be smart enough to make cultural diversity work (my humble opinion).

"I don't see how a 50 year old person (not myself,I'm in my 20s) can be culturally compatible with people young enough to be his/her grand child."

30 years is generally one generation, not two.

And "culturally compatible" enough to work together is way different from being culturally compatible enough to date, or whatever.

When did I mention dating? I was clearly talking about work culture. 30 years from now you will most likely find that the trendy work culture of the present would be a dated old way of doing things. Change is inevitable. My whole point was to promote cultural diversity, so that if someone shows up in a black suite and ties and prefers a cubicle over an open office space then the people who entered the work force wearing sandals and shorts to work should be accomodating as he should accomodate their views -- so long as none of this gets in the way.

Aegism in silicon valley is a chronic problem, are you saying it doesn't exist or are you claiming "culture fit" isn't used to push out older workers at some companies?

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