The keys are not to let it phase you, stay positive and ask clarifying questions to give clear answers. It's often far more about personality than you may think.
Honestly, I just need to know that they can code to the level expected, work together, and aren’t completely looney.
I've worked with all types of personalities. The only ones that ever really bugged me were the excessively arrogant. Some types just grate on you. It's how you deal with and interact that is important. Can you get along with people that are different? Different backgrounds, personalities, cold, super-warm, etc. The culture fit is incredibly important for good or bad. One person can make a team very toxic very quickly.
I hope not. If so management need to be replaced
Inability to work with all types here is primary displayed by the "less than typical" personalities through. Not by someone who decides that he does not want to answer insults with "please may I have another one, sir". I understand importance of not being overly sensitive, but so should be valued ability to control yourself and not be abrasive in the first place.
Otherwise being asshole becomes competitive advantage in that company.
I don't mean to say that less then pleasant people should not be in team, but that criticising them and refusing to accept that behavior should be standard and accepted responses by other people. Including leaving the room or directly defending themselves.
> There are times when you've been working 16-18 hour days for a few days and can get cranky.
That is planning and organizational failure. Also self-awarness failure. No one is effective at 18 hours a day and demanding that collegues tiptoe around you or and spend effort on your crankiness instead of work is a.) unfair b.) ineffective.
If others can't tell you about you mistakes or question you or just have to deal with abrasiveness because you are cranky after sleep deprivation, then it is your fault and you are slowing others down.
Interviews are mostly (~80%) about evaluating the candidate for fit. They almost always have a time limit. The interviewers job is sometimes made harder by a candidate who answers a question different from the one asked, or who rambles unnecessarily, or who continues talking after the interviewer is satisfied with the answer to a particular question.
In these situations, the interviewer needs to quickly cut off the candidate and move to a different line of enquiry in order to collect enough useful signal during the allotted time.
This can come across as abrasive to some people, particularly if it happens multiple times during a single interview. And the impression can be compounded if they feel the interviewer cut them off as they were saying something which would have increased their odds of success.
Interviews in our industry are the chaotic mutant hybrid of "Guess what I'm thinking!" and fraternal hazing rituals.
I've been interviewed a few times by self-declared bar raisers. Not impressed.
One raiser dismissed outright all my work on grammars, saying the tool (ANTLR) did all the work. Awkward pause. Has he never written a parser? Is he making a joke? Oh. He's serious. Unfortunately, I eventually sarcastically replied "Ya, and the compiler writes all my code for me."
I'm not a CS researcher. Our pithy jobs are client/server CRUD apps with some glue. Cut a string from here, paste it over there. Do some validation. Make sure the concurrency scales.
Not rocket science. Stop treating me like an initiate. I've been doing this longer than most.
For example, a company may practice test driven development (TDD), and may evaluate for a candidates ability and desire to use TDD as part of their engineering culture fit. TDD is not necessarily better than alternatives, and a candidate may not necessarily be better because they can do it. It might mean passing on better candidates who don’t prefer TDD.
Culture fit can cover many different aspects, and most are not about being past a “good enough” bar, but rather valuing the same things as the company. To “fail” a culture fit interview is arguably a good thing as otherwise the candidate may have found working at the company unfulfilling, uninteresting or difficult.
No more startups for me, thank you very much.
If you had been asked a bunch of questions in your interview that boiled down to "do you like surfing", then you may have "failed" that interview, but that would have been good for you and the company as you ultimately did not have the culture fit they were looking for.
Obviously desire and ability to surf does not correlate with software engineering ability (I assume that's what you applied for?) but things like communication, learning practices, candour, empathy, etc, can correlate highly.
I was informed that they liked to go surfing together during the interviews. It just turned out that bobbing around in freezing water with surfboards shooting at me from every angle just wasn't my thing at all.
Of course that's not the real why, my team lead was an arrogant and ignorant asshole who liked to throw developers under the bus to cover his own ass. Which doesn't work that well on people with a tiny bit of experience and integrity.
But cultural fit, like codes of conduct is a fine tool when you want to get rid of someone.
Some engineers have strong feelings and would prefer not to work in some ways. There are ways to do great engineering without TDD, they may be great engineers, but for a company that practices TDD they may be a poor fit.
To take it to a bit more of an extreme: I like code review. I believe it's a good thing. I want to have my code reviewed and to learn from that, and I want to be able to review my colleagues' code and know that they will take the feedback seriously. I would not work somewhere that did not do code review as I believe it correlates with good engineering practices. In this way, I would be a poor culture fit at somewhere that did not do code review, as I would be pushing to have code reviewed, or wanting to.
Yes, it is, because no one wants to work with jerks and weirdos. It is jerk and weirdo discrimination, which is fine.
Assuming they have roughly equivalent experience and backgrounds. It comes down to how well you might get along working with someone. Every office has a culture, and working where you and the company are a bad fit sucks a lot. It usually means sticking it out for a few months just to see if it settles down, or that things get better. Then starting the whole interview process all over again. I'd much rather self-eliminate or be eliminated quickly. Hell it's often after several interviews that you just get a bad feeling, or are dropped from the other side.
It's ALL descrimination. That doesn't mean they are descriminating by a protected class (gender, sexuality, race, etc). If everyone in the office went out for drinks every night at the end of the day, working into the evening, I wouldn't be comfortable with that. Once in a while, sure. It really depends on specifics, that doesn't mean it's inherently bad.