Cracking the Culture Interview

However, if you're not trying to assess a person's soft skills, motivations, and working style, you're leaving a huge part of the hiring decision up to luck. At the end of the day you want to hire someone who is going to do a great job at the company. There's more to that than passing a coding interview.

Often times it's not even about being a "good" person or a "shitty" person. All of that is relative to the role and environment.

For example, I've worked with some engineers who are excellent at their specialization but have no interest in working on areas outside of their domain. This might be a perfect fit for a large organization that is looking for a domain expert but a potentially poor fit for a startup that needs engineers who enjoy doing a bit of everything.

On the flip side, I've seen some engineers who have thrived at smaller companies but then really struggle to navigate the politics necessary to have impact at larger companies. Maybe they're even capable of learning this at some point, but I wouldn't hire a senior engineer who isn't able to give me a solid example of navigating some interpersonal disagreement.

You can't assess for this kind of alignment without digging into a person's background and experiences.

I think inevitably if you're looking for a job you're going to have to talk about some of these key stories at one point or another. I wrote this to help people get the best shot at landing a job that's a good fit for them. Even if you don't end up using these stories at all, I hope they may even be valuable purely as a self-reflection exercise.