How to Hire

I have found that freelancing avoids even coming to the question of culture fit. Clients don't care what you know or what kind of books you read or where you went to school, they care what you can do. I have been turned down for jobs for not figuring out their algorithms, whereas the one client I have (I'm open to new clients btw) has told me that he's glad that he found me, because I get the job done fast and well and for cheap.

The downside of this is that you're expected to do a perfect job 100% of the time and have to bite every minute that you lose to yak shaving or other problems, whereas if you work for an employer, they are more understanding if it takes a day to solve some stupid Java XML configuration issue.

If knowing "the red book" were so important to Google, you'd think they would make sure their own search engine knew how to find it.

I have no idea which book they're referring to. For red computer science books, the only ones that come to mind are Numerical Recipes (probably not a Google favorite), one version of Appel's compiler book (not really an algorithms book), and perhaps the old edition of AIMA (though on further inspection, it's more brown).

In a sense yes its "wrapped up in a particular culture" I guess the culture that exposed me to this "red book" was a CS bachelors that included graphical programming as a course.

Edit: If someone from google said to read the red book as a helper for interviewing I would probably return with "wait you mean the OpenGL book?"

[0] https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-i...

1. We're a professionalized industry? Really? I don't see any licensure outside Texas, any credentials that aren't sheerest fluff, any teeth whatsoever to the ACM's deontological ramblings^W^W Code of Ethics, any etc.

2. For reasons I don't know and which are another topic of discussion entirely, the CS industry is all about high turnover. Career advancement comes less from promotion and more from switching employers. Under these circumstances, if you are a company that employs software engineers, do you really want to make an investment whose returns will mostly be reaped by others, if not by your direct competitors?

When I've been interviewed it was telling when the person didn't realize I was interviewing them also.

I'm no special snowflake and I am definitely not a White male and I can say with almost certainty that I haven't been discriminated against in all of the many interviews I've had. I know because I've always gone through recruiters, my resume never went down a "black hole", and my success rate from being submitted to a job to not being rejected (I've taken myself out of the running after getting an offer is high). I'm also not in Silicon Valley.

What training does the company need to provide software developers? All the training I've needed I taught myself. It was for my benefit.

I would add mentorship to this. Even an informal program would be fine, as long as it means hiring more junior candidates who are then mentored (i.e. internally trained) by the more senior staff who were hired partly for this purpose. Even the mentor tends to learn from this arrangement, so everyone benefits.

> Startups are frankly lying to themselves if they think they hire hyper-qualified people anyways

Whether or not that's the case for an early startup, the credibility of such a conceit wears thin as a company grows. Unfortunately, the attitude of "we don't have the resources for training or mentorship" doesn't seem to dissipate, even with dozens of engineers.

As an interviewer, you're potentially going to be spending 40 hours a week with this person. You don't really want to hire a robot.

As an interviewee, my private life is none of my employers business. Maybe my hobby is some super kinky shit that I don't really want my employer to know about. There are certainly a lot of things that I do in my own time that I won't talk about at work, some of it because it's not exactly legal and some of it just because I don't really want to deal with my colleagues judging me.

It's useless to pretend though that our work life and private life are firewalled from each other. Our work life does leak into our private life, and vice versa.

Ok so, you're so scarred by bad interviews that an attempt at small talk makes you walk. Fine, your call. But I'll choose what I do when someone wants to talk about light material for a few minutes, thank you very much.

To be honest, if someone walked out of an interview with me because I asked them "So anything you like doing in your spare time?" I'd probably be glad that they'd saved me some time. A response of "Sorry, but I like to keep my work and personal life separate" is totally reasonable. I spend more time with my deskmates than my partner during the week. I don't care if they're into running/anime/videogames/heavy metal, I just want to know that if I ask them a question they're not going to get up and walk out of the room!

I think your definition is true for technical hires for tech firms. For everyone else, the "beer" definition is operative.

The types of things you mention seem perfectly legitimate. For example, I've advised someone who I knew from a previous employer who I knew needed a lot of structure and direction to not apply to a company that I knew was considerably more... chaotic.

If you tell me your company culture is an open office and you do lots of get-togethers in the evening and focus on working together on everything rather than going off and working on problems individually for a while, I'll probably pass.

The issue is many companies that rely on "culture fit" don't objectively define what it is. So it often becomes a dumping ground for whatever dumb biases and subjective criteria folks involved in hiring might have.

If your company actually has a hard definition of your internal culture and uses that in comparable fashion across candidates, I don't think that's what the author means.

If the hiring manager doesn’t drink beer, they aren't looking to hire someone to drink beer with, they will tend to hire the person who also doesn’t drink beer...conforming to their personal bias. Of course that has nothing to do with qualifications, and it is to damning to admit personal bias...in comes “cultural fit” which sounds sophisticated and in the interest of the company.

Talk to the same people promoting “cultural fit” about diversity, and watch the mental gymnastics of them simultaneously claiming they want diversity of candidates, diversity of thought/experience...so long as the diversity falls within the scope of “cultural fit”. It’s a lot like university giving professors tenure, sure you can have tenure and be protected from termination based on individual opinion after you prove to the university your opinion conforms to the university’s way of thinking and “fit”.

In consulting it's "wouldn't go crazy if stuck in an airport for 12 hours with"

*enjoy here means that you'll be able to enjoy a non-toxic work atmosphere, will be able to provide and receive constructive criticism and comments about your contributions; the healthy working relationship does sometimes lead to enjoying having a beer with them from time to time, but the former is definitely the primary goal in trying to find a culture fit.

At a recent job the engineers were asked to look for new candidates from their social networks at the same time as we were asked to look for more diverse candidates. I pointed out the inherent contradiction, and was met with effectively a shrug.

This is objectively not 'culture fit'

The big problem with "culture fit" in interviews is that it gives you an escape hatch to avoid the conclusions that concrete objective assessments provide.

Candidate did poorly technical qualification challenges, but man were they great to talk to at the interview! Fuck it let's hire! Candidate did great on the technical qualification but hrm they have a family and live out in the suburbs? Meh let's pass this time and maybe come back to them later.

You might as well not be hiring rigorously or objectively at all.

My experience running concrete work-sample-based resume hiring programs (we're hiring now!) is that every force in the institution you're working for is going to push you away from trusting your assessment results. And if you can't rely on those results and learn from them, you can't iterate and get better at hiring. And indeed, most organizations never do get better at hiring, and draw from the exact same pool of "conventionally hirable" candidates everyone else does, and it's a disaster.

How do you assess communication and collaboration?

How do you assess handling of "rainy-day scenarios"?

How do you assess learning and growth ability? Just how long does your interview take?

How do you assess teaching and mentoring ability?

How do you assess whether someone thrives in your work environment?

Everybody says they assess for these things, push comes to shove. But most of the time, they're really covering for the fact that their final decisions are based on a collective gut-feel assessment.

This is exactly what I (and hiring managers in my company) mean when we say "cultural fit". The thought of having a beer with them or other social activities doesn't even cross my mind during the interviewing process.

People also seem forget that it goes both ways. For example, we had a candidate come in. He had good technical and communication skills, he could get along. I had zero doubts about his ability to perform the job well. I didn't hire him because I thought that he would would leave because due to the lack of cultural fit and to the fact that cultural fit was a deal breaker for him.

I didn't ask him about his interests. Instead I asked him questions about who he worked with, conflicts he had to solve with past co-workers, etc. He opened up and talked about close friendships at most jobs. He had two jobs where he didn't stay long. When he talked about those, you could tell that he got along but didn't have much in common with his co-workers. So I called his old bosses and one said "Oh, he was great, learned quickly. I wish he would've stayed." When I asked why he left, he said "Well, we're mostly in our late 40s-50, we have families, I don't know if it was the right fit. He wanted somebody to get a beer with after work and go camping on weekends."

How is this computed? Since almost no programmers have collective bargaining agreements, in practice this seems to mean simply "who can negotiate the best".

Frankly, I think I'd rather the industry mature enough that we can be interchangeable cogs. Then we wouldn't spend so much time arguing about meaningless trivia like programming languages or coding style.

Because you might benefit from having someone with a different perspective in a professional environment.

An older parent might not "fit in" with a team of 22 year-old fresh grads, but still provide valuable experience and perspective in a way that an additional 22 year-old might not. You can probably extrapolate how this might also affect women and minorities.

Sure, in an ideal world "fit in" means simply "can coexist peacefully with", but in practice it can end up being a dog-whistle phrase (very similarly to "culture fit", which the article alludes to).

>The author basically says “don’t just hire people you’d want to have a beer with” and then goes on to say that they do hire for cultural fit by looking at their ability to solve problems and overcome challenges

Those seem pretty different. One is someone I click with at a personal level. The other is someone who can do the sort of work the business needs. I've worked with plenty of people who I didn't especially like but who were clearly good at their jobs.

Sure, at some level, there are elements of culture in whether you're a process-driven organization, a let-the-best-idea win, etc. But the standard "not cultural fit" is more code for you're too old, too quiet, don't want to hang with the guys after work...

"PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. "

http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-...

You seem to assume everyone agrees that making hiring decisions on factors with zero relevance to doing the work doesn't make sense. Sadly that's not the case.

People has such widely varying definitions of "culture fit" that "hire for culture fit" doesn't mean anything either.

Gee, it's like they aren't even trying. It's so unscientific I can't take the process seriously at all.

I worked for Anthony at Netflix. He's one of the smartest people I've met.

Also, Patty was making the exact same point as you on job titles. (Note the quotes.) Netflix didn't care about your title at all when they came recruiting.

I think you're misinterpreting what the article said.