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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

The term “culture fit” sounds very vague, but at many companies there are clearly defined criteria, you just don’t know them.

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.

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The company should be training employees to use their process, not expecting to hire people who already prefer their process. TDD is not some magical thing that requires years of study and practice and apprenticeship to do correctly. It's an approach, you apply it, it might be a little weird for a few weeks if you're not used to it, and then it's fine. What next, will they reject people for preferring trunk-based development over git-flow?

TDD is really one of those things you either like or don't. I for one hate working that way and would be happy to know about it as early as possible. No amount of training will change that.

Some engineers are happy to use the process that works in the company, if that means going with TDD then they do that, but they have no strong feelings either way. That could be a good culture fit!

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.

My favorite cultural fit failure was trying to opt out of the weekly mandatory surfing lessons, barely got my wet suit off before I was called to a Friday morning meeting with the founders and told to grab my stuff and leave quietly.

No more startups for me, thank you very much.

I think that's a particularly bad example, and I'm sorry you had such a bad experience of startups.

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.

It was worse than that, I relocated to another country for the job and they had just helped me setup a four month apartment contract.

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.

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