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Comment by MichaelMoser123 | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of talk on culture fit. Most of the talk on "culture fit" is bringing up a hidden layer of discrimination, of one sort of the other - to the detriment of the companies that are applying these rules. Cultural openness is a factor of success, discrimination is leading into the opposite direction - if you ask me.

> The best leaders track their success rate, are not afraid of admitting hiring mistakes, and will hire slow, fire fast.

in me this brings up the desire to post the picture that JWZ (Jamie Zawinski) is showing, upon detecting a referrer header that points to this site. Look up in google what Jamie Zawinski has to say on Ycombinator... (He is also credited with Netscape's decision to open-source Netscape Navigator, along with most of the work that resulted in the rendering engine for that browser; that's why we have Firefox)

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> There is a lot of talk on culture fit. Most of the talk on "culture fit" is bringing up a hidden layer of discrimination, of one sort of the other - to the detriment of the companies

That’s the cynical interpretation, but more often than not I’ve seen culture fit used to protect candidates from taking a job they’ll loathe.

At one of my first jobs they tried to ban anything that could be called culture fit from the hiring criteria. It led to a couple hires yo joined, hated the company, and quit within weeks or months. The first one was a candidate who emphasized planning and predictability and complained that past employers had moved too fast. We were a startup. Predictably, he hated it. But we were disqualified from voicing those concerns in the hiring decision process because it was “culture fit” and they were afraid it would lead to discrimination.

There were several other instances before the policy quietly went away and we were allowed to evaluate candidates for compatibility with our engineering culture once again.

All employment processes discriminate, the question is for and against what traits, and to the exclusion of what else?

"Culture fit" is pretty much trading off communication efficiency and high trust against diversity of thought.

You don't have to set so many guidelines as people already know how to behave, and what's expected of one another, but you're more vulnerable to groupthink and related cognitive biases.

"We're every shade of the rainbow on this ship, but even our Klingon thinks Klingons are evil."

> "Culture fit" is pretty much trading off communication efficiency and high trust against diversity of thought.

I think I understand now: if the structure of your company is strictly top down, then you will have to value "communication efficiency" and "high trust" criteria higher than "diversity of thought".

However, you might not be able to pivot efficiently, if your core assumptions are disproved. That's the situation where you might need "diversity of thought" - and the ability to incorporate different kinds of feedback.

Though I don't quite think that you will find this insight in this frigging book.

I'd say it's the opposite. Diversity of thought is what requires a top-down structure to force everyone to eventually go down the same path despite believing it's not the right path.

If require everyone to just organically align based on whatever argument is made that the group sees as the best then, congratulations, you have a mono-culture around that. That's not how most people act or react.

It can go either way. A top-down company can be interested or disinterested in culture. Some would argue that for a company to affect disinterest is an active and consequential choice. Consider the "bring your whole self to work" touchy-feely open-plan Valley startup vs a trad IBM-style cube farm. The latter is arguably more accommodating of genuine oddballs, for "good fences make good neighbours" kind of reasons.

As regards pivoting, think about it like a joint having freedom of movement on more than one axis. You want to keep flexibility in as many as possible, but also straight-line speed/strength/efficiency. Somewhere there's going to be a trade-off. A genuinely diverse team (I don't mean just "ticking all the DEI boxes", but profound differences in background and life experience) takes longer to find their groove than a bunch from similar social backgrounds, but they'll have insights that a "TV sitcom cast"-looking team never will.

I accepted your side quest. The first page of results are all comments on hacker news about Jamie Zawinski and where I gave up.

Do tell…

This is supposed to exemplify my point: the attitudes of Mr. Zawinski may be questionable; however his contribution and his output are not questioned by anybody. We would all be worse off without these contributions.

I'm still none the wiser. What attitudes?

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