Comment by jamestomasino | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamestomasino | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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