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Comment by rfnslyr | Hacker News Reader

"But there’s something off. He’s not productive. He’s not a culture fit."

I've interviewed at a company before for about a week. 4 interviews later they tell me they won't go through with me for undisclosed reasons. This was before I had seen the company or anyone besides the immediate people interviewing. I then asked just to see what the company layout was like and they gave me a tour of the offices.

Jesus fucking H christ, everyone was the same. It was all 20-25 year olds, glasses, beards, tshirts, jeans, all white males. If that's ever a reason to not hire someone or even fire someone it's not a company you want to work at in the first place.

If the word "culture" is in any sentence when you're hiring/firing me, I'm punching you right in the fucking face (not actually though) and leaving. It's basically saying "for some arbitrary reason we're going to fire you, but we don't really know why and neither do you, bye!" Sorry for not having a beard, thick rim glasses, and not liking the same N64 video games as you.

I'm probably just bitter though.

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I agree that some companies use "culture fit" as an excuse to eliminate diversity. But that doesn't mean that "culture fit" isn't a real thing when not abused in this way.

I have found "culture fit" to often mean problems with adjusting to the process and management structure of an organization.

I have worked with folks from corporate environments who never adjusted to having to find their own work and set their own goals in the startup world. And I have worked (briefly) at companies where I liked the people and the work but could not be productive or happy with the kind of micro-management I was expected to put up with.

That's why it's valuable to interview for "culture" (both when hiring and being hired). You need to talk out loud about expectations of how we work together and how we decide what to do. Have this conversation enough times, both in interviews and just chatting with peers, and you'll see things you agree with, things you disagree with but don't mind, and things that are absolute warning signs of toxic environments.

I disagree with your definition. If you can't get your work done because you need micromanagement then it is simply a case of not doing your job, and there is no value bringing "culture" into the discussion. The term "cultural fit" is a contrast to competency and productivity, not a subsection.

Any business that's sole focus is not accomplishing their mission is dysfunctional. "Cultural Fit" is always toxic - unfairly discriminatory in hiring and non productive in practice.

> "Cultural Fit" is always toxic

You clearly never had to put up with The Angry Guy.

Cultural fit, I agree, it's a catchall term that covers everything from blatant aesthetic discrimination to merciful removal of toxic characters.

In my experience, with rare exceptions, "toxic characters" is a kind of dogwhistle for "that guy is not in our clique." It's born of the kind of immaturity and never-left-high-school mentality I've come to associate with lingerers especially at large organizations.

"The Angry Guy" in these cases is often "angry" only by projection, or frankly with cause.

I have been the "toxic character." In my experience the term means "allergic to bullshit."

I've been Angry Gal too, but only for about two weeks - then I recognised the poor 'cultural fit' that I was being (my bad, I should have never taken the job in the first place) and I left for greener and more congenial pastures.

The conditions of the market may not allow such radical choices in every single case; but I don't have a problem with acknowledging that despite being right in my anger towards the bullshit I was seeing, I was actually being disruptive and damaging to that particular (horrid) environment. Not everyone is suited to every company - it seems a very basic truth to me.

I think we're in agreement mainly, but I wouldn't self-describe as being "disruptive and damaging" were I you. Perhaps just "disruptive," but such an environment can't be "damaged" any more than it already is, in my opinion.

I know Angry guy! He sits next to Chatty Kathy! No one likes a Chatty Kathy.

No, you're being unreasonable. If someone has come from a big company where getting something done involves submitting a form in triplicate and waiting, and you drop them into an environment where they've got to hustle to get anything from anyone else in the company, they'll be lost. Similarly if you took someone from a startup and dropped them into a huge organisation, they would be equally nonproductive.

True story, a few companies ago I worked at a medium sized place where we had people employed full time to allocate storage and IP addresses. Getting them to actually do it tho' was like getting blood from a stone. Unless one of them owed you a favour, you would literally have to stand over them and not let them go until they did their damn jobs. That was a highly dysfunctional company. The next place, the people in those jobs practically fell over themselves to help, they were like a breath of fresh air. As a consumer of these services, I'd have alienated myself immediately if I hadn't taken the time to adapt to the culture. And if I'd been going the other way, well I'd have got nothing accomplished, expecting people to actually want to do jobs they're bloody paid for. AArgh.

Neither of them is "wrong" and both of them can adapt - but someone's got to take them aside and explain the lay of the land, not just leave them to flounder.

I work at a big company, where on paper everything needs to be done in triplicate. That said, you _have_ to hustle, because 'getting stuff done' involves lots of interpersonal relationships and leveraging those relationships to actually get anything done - if you just leave it to process, you'd wait forever. Beyond that, you often need to know who to ask to find the entry point to the process, as with most companies there is very little up to date documentation about anything useful.

Isn't it just as likely that they were unhappy in the previous environment and would thrive in a more self-motivated position? I guess we will never know because you have already determined with one question exactly how the situation will play out.

People are complex. Groups of people, magnitudes more so. I have seen an interview end with unanimous positive assessment and after being hired the subject fail spectacularly. I have also seen candidates barely squeak through the hiring process become star players. Anyone who believes that they can predict the outcome of personalities from a job interview is a great and pompous fool.

Do you see what you did there? You defined "culture fit" as a codeword for a lack of management and process!

Hmm, I don't see that at all. Every company has a culture, a way of making decisions, and a way things get done. We're talking about how those happen.

That can include things like "most people do GTD", "most communication is asynchronous" and "we're all accountable." Or it can include PRDs, a specific agile method, or constant off-sites about improving efficiency. In many places, it isn't thought about, so they think they have no process or management, when they do, and it's just a secret culture or a back-door process.

The reason to talk about "culture" is to have these discussions to hear what people take for granted, and which things they groan about. I've worked at places where "obviously" we need an annual plan and at places where "obviously" we can have no idea when things are shipping and shouldn't even try to. That's why you have to talk about it in depth: one person's "we have no process" is another person's convoluted, opaque process.

Micromanagement is not management. "Figure out your own tasks" is not management. Something "most people" do is not cultural. "Constant" off-sites? I don't even know where to put that one.

My point is that while these may be sold as process and management, these concepts are more values than states, and many of the examples you've used illustrate a lack (or low values) of presence.

one person's "we have no process" is another person's convoluted, opaque process.

And they'd both be right.

I've never worked in a very small company, but I've been working in very small teams. While claiming a 'culture clash' seems pretty much of a copt-out from the employer's part, it's true that one single person can make or break a small team. Sometimes the clash is purely of personality (an example I've witnessed: one very competitive and personal-win-orientated alpha male in a group of laid back, traditional geeks), sometimes it's procedural (i.e. a former start-up guy in a corporate environment) but I do see potential so-called culture problems as very real and potentially unsolvable, if not by the removal of the "offending" party.

Having said that, the threat of an established monoculture is probably much worse for productivity, morale and sheer fairness that having to put up with one sour (or clashing) apple.

Look, a startup can't afford not to look like that. We'll likely hire a male college swim team[1] to put on decorative glasses - yes all of them will - and wear our t-shirt in a group photo. Then we'll put it on our Team page with a satirical heading "Just a typical startup team" with a very small disclaimer that the photo is representative, satirical, and contains none of our employees.

Anyone who "needs" to see it will see it, and immediately check it off in their head then click through our other tabs. Meanwhile we can continue hiring the best people from all over the world regardless of age, gender, looks, or location. They also don't have to spend two thirds of their salary on rent, pizza, gaming gear, and lattes to fit in, and you will be more than welcome wherever you are located or if we open a regional office. Keep us in mind.

[1] representative picture: http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/oakl/sports/c-swim/auto_...

The last interview that I was on where someone was not hired because of "culture" was because when an experienced devop was asked for an interesting disaster story, he had none. Then, when pushed, he had one, but one with parenthetical comments about how he had told them not to make the mistake.

We said "culture" but what we really meant was, "He's showing the kind of defensive behavior that you REALLY do not want in a devop when things go pear shaped."

And, given defensive behavior was already seen, do you think we really want to try to justify what was clear to us?

Or maybe he was exactly right and management was extremely foolish not to listen to him.

If your plan is to have excellent punching bags for when things go south who you can blame and who will not fight back early on, then your not hiring him was a good plan. If you wanted to avoid disasters, well, perhaps you should think about it.

I can't blame the guy for not wanting to talk badly about his former management; it's not a way to win friends in a job interview.

Eehhhh, maybe. You shouldn't talk bad about your current/former employer.

On the other hand, surely everyone working in any kind of sysadmin role has a story of things going sideways.

I'm still worried about the pop-psychology of "well, good candidates should have <stories>, and he didn't have a <story>, so he's not a good candidate." Just substitute other words in for "story" and you get more of a gut-feel that often doesn't translate into real world success.

> On the other hand, surely everyone working in any kind of sysadmin role has a story of things going sideways.

I want to agree with this but there are some big caveats.

1. What if you don't expect this question and thus don't trawl through memories ahead of time? It's easy to feel put-on-the-spot and have your mind go blank.

2. What if you're really talented and worked at a place with rigorous process and thus all the stuff going bad gets caught in test or QA or whatever? Nothing really goes sideways in that situation.

3. There are a lot of situations where things go bad not because you've made a mistake but because management's made a mistake. Not wanting to talk about those situations is understandable for a couple of reasons. Not talking bad about the former employer is one, so is not wanting to get all worked up about former management screwing you in a job interview.

4. You could have been on either end of the situation described by a previous HN story: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmer... If you're on the "lazy" team you might have been a damn-fine sysadmin with no horror stories. Or on the "hard working" team with plenty of disaster stories and a questionable level of talent.

I'm not saying that having disaster stories makes you a bad sysadmin, nor am I saying that not having disaster stories makes you a good one. But I am suggesting that the correlation between disaster stories and skill level probably isn't p = 0.99 and might be more like p = 0.5 or 0.2 or maybe 0.07.

Even if you find that the correlation is 0.7 (pretty decent) are you going to be interviewing enough people such that you can be sure that you don't end up with sampling error?

If you need to hire 10 sysadmins and you interview 200 then perhaps you'll do a decent job of identifying the good candidates. But if you only need to hire one and you only interview 10 you don't have the law of large numbers on your side. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

> 1. What if you don't expect this question and thus don't trawl through memories ahead of time? It's easy to feel put-on-the-spot and have your mind go blank.

Well now aren't we just walking about interview skills? Interviewing poorly leads to not getting job offers, and if that's why he didn't have a better example off the top of his head, it's due to his poor interview skills that he wasn't hired.

> 2. What if you're really talented and worked at a place with rigorous process and thus all the stuff going bad gets caught in test or QA or whatever? Nothing really goes sideways in that situation.

I don't think these places exist. I work for a Fortune 500 with an absolute ton of process due to the sector we work in. I haven't even been here 2 years, I'm not even in sysops, and I can think of one or two things that would have made a good interview story about something "going sideways."

1. Any good interview process should try and see through the interview skills and look more at the job candidate's actual skills that they're being hired for. A company's inability to do so isn't a referendum on the candidate but rather on management. Unless of course the company is hiring the candidate to be interviewed professionally.

2. I said a rigorous process, not a ton of process. There are good processes and there are not good processes. The fact that you work at a Fortune 500 company doesn't automatically make your processes good.

If Fortune 500 companies were so much better at executing processes than startups surely they would also be better at executing "finding new businesses" processes and thus startups would never get off the ground. The established businesses with far more financial and human resources would immediately swoop in on any opportunities.

But surprise! The world doesn't work that way. Being big doesn't mean being right.

> 1. Any good interview process should try and see through the interview skills and look more at the job candidate's actual skills that they're being hired for. A company's inability to do so isn't a referendum on the candidate but rather on management. Unless of course the company is hiring the candidate to be interviewed professionally.

This makes sense if the company is desperate to fill the role or needs tons of time. In many company's hiring is a process where false negatives (kicking someone out because of warning signs) is a better safety than a false positive (hiring someone and having them turn out to be crappy / toxic).

Hiring is hard but firing people is even harder. Some companies have the bandwidth to manage people who are underperforming and raise up their general level of performance and some don't have that luxury.

That being said, defining valid false negatives versus ridiculous bias IS HARD. There are things that are bad from a cultural fit perspective, but if you can only say hes a bad cultural fit and not give more details, if not to the candidate then at least to the rest of the hiring team, then you are not doing your job.

Good candidates should prepare for interviews. Interviews typically require that a candidates are able to reflect on previous successes and failures and provide insights so a hiring team can review their candidacy. Failure to do show shows either:

1. lack of understanding of professional working environments (ie. interview structure)

2. lack of preparation for the interview

3. lack of ability for self-reflection

4. actual lack of any experience with which to construct even a lame story.

Or, failure could show that the candidate has an understanding that how he handled "previous successes" and "previous failures" is almost certainly irrelevant to the job being applied for. Unless the new company's line of business is substantially similar to the previous company's, a candidate's experiences, success, failures, and how he handled them are at best useful as an aggregate measure of "stuff he's done." When the line of business is substantially similar, the candidate's prior experience at the similar company is only marginally more applicable, because actual differences in the internal operations figure more prominently. It doesn't indicate, necessarily, any thing at all about his personality, how he will do his job with the new company, or really anything else other than that "candidate has worked places."

Human interactions are complicated, stochastic things and I can't help but think that interview processes that include "describe a success/describe a failure" in order to "get a feel" for the person are a hackneyed attempt to distill these complicated things into overly simplistic checklists and scores.

If your plan is to have excellent punching bags for when things go south who you can blame and who will not fight back early on, then your not hiring him was a good plan.

If your culture is sick enough that this is what happens, then no good devop should want to work for you.

Defensive behavior goes hand in hand with cultures where you need to defend yourself. Nobody is good enough that they never make mistakes. What matters is what happens after the mistake. In a good culture, whoever knows what the problem might actually be - who was often the cause of said problem - will immediately speak up and suffer no consequences for doing so. But the person who screws up and then tries to hide it will get fired.

I do admit that there are too few good cultures. But those that exist have to filter out defensive behavior if they wish to remain good.

I've hired a couple of people who claimed to never have problems and/or pointed out to me in the interview that the test situation I ask them to diagnose "could never happen", even when I'm drawing on personal experience.

Each time, the person in question turned out to be a terrible hire and never lasted more than a month.

If you can't come up with a disaster in your career, you've never had a career.

And more importantly, don't know how to deal with one when they do occur. And they always do.

What an interesting dance interviewing is.

>'Then, when pushed, he had one, but one with parenthetical comments about how he had told them not to make the mistake. We said "culture" but what we really meant was, "He's showing the kind of defensive behavior that you REALLY do not want in a devop when things go pear shaped."'

I had an interview where I responded to a "greatest challenge" question with a true story about recovering a disastrous project from the brink. I related the story in a very "what we did" as opposed to "what was wrong" sense.

Afterwards, the interviewer pressed on about what actually went wrong in the project to throw it into a death spiral to begin with.

I generally try to avoid talking about previous employers, particularly in a negative light when interviewing, but I provided an honest answer - a short tale of cronyism, incompetence and prior efforts made to save the project.

I don't think the interviewer took too well to that response and I had to wonder if I'd been pegged as being defensive or accusatory there? I expect I was.

In the end, I'm thinking questions which might beg or demand talking ill of a past situation can be a no-win situation for the interviewee and not necessarily informative for the interviewer.

" everyone was the same. It was all 20-25 year olds, glasses, beards, tshirts, jeans, all white males."

Culture is not just about ethnicity or how you look like or what hobbies do you have ? At work, culture is about how you work together with the team to accomplish the same goal that the company has. Whether it is making shitload of money for shareholders or building the most beautiful product, you should ideally believe in that culture. I care less if all co-workers around me are white or black or orange, what I do care about is how they treat me, their work, their company, their attitude. What kind of work environment does the company promote ? Open door ? Face to face conversations ? These are the examples of "culture".

In the U.S., we have 'at-will employment' laws. So, unless you're caught stealing, engaging in racial or sexual discrimination or harassment, doing drugs, or committing some felonious criminal offense (though even then those last two cases it is still arguable), you can be fired without just cause and without warning, and any court will dismiss any standing claims against the employer. Thus, if you're told you're not a 'culture fit', that's actually more than most companies need to tell you when they boot you out the door.

At-will employment: very complicated. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/what-is-at-wi...

Laws on termination are very complex in general. You need a lawyer to navigate that stuff. There are a lot of things that it's illegal to fire someone for doing (including, for example, discussing salary with co-workers). If you're under threat of a PIP/firing you can usually make one apply in the 30-90 days of the PIP.

More than a lawsuit, companies fear disparagement (unless their reputations are in the toilet already) and that's a good enough reason, in general, to write decent severance packages. Warning: never explicitly threat disparagement in a severance negotiation. That gets into extortion territory and while you're unlikely to be taken to jail, you've lost all leverage.

Generally, you should aim for a fair (not unreasonably high) severance and more important try to work out a good reference even when let go. Always, after any termination, check your own references. Employment suits become he-said/she-said affairs very quickly, so the behavior of the people involved will determine a lot. If they're giving good references, reasonable severance offers, etc. then the odds are very strongly in their favor. If they give a bad reference, the situation is much to your advantage and your argument that you were fired 2 days after disclosing migraines suddenly finds a more receptive audience.

(Obligatory disclaimer: this isn't legal advice, I'm not your lawyer, etc):

It doesn't quite work like that. You can fire someone for any reason at all, as long as it isn't one of the disallowed reasons (discrimination on the basis race, gender, religion, age, etc). However, the reason you give need not be taken at face value. A jury is entitled to conclude that your stated reason is pretextual, and a discriminatory reason is the real one. There's an evidentiary showing the plaintiff must meet first, but it can be purely circumstantial and pretext is often what the claim really boils down to.

That's where shit like "he's not a cultural fit" can get you into trouble. It's basically begging the jury (or a judge at summary judgment) to disbelieve you and conclude that you really fired someone for a discriminatory reason. I.e. "he's not a cultural fit... because he's black and we're all white" or "she's not a cultural fit... because she's a woman and we're all men."

A sibling comment to yours recasts "culture" to "process and management structure." That's much more firm ground. "He's ineffective at his job because he can't work well with our internal processes" or "she's ineffective at her job because she doesn't take direction from our management."

Also, this isn't just a legal issue. Talking about "process and management structure," which is specific and grounded in the ultimate question of whether someone is doing a good job, instead of culture, which is amorphous and can encompass things that have nothing to do with the work, focuses your thinking on factors that you should actually care about.

One reason people form unions is to get a contract with their employer that sets up a grievance process so that you can't be fired because your manager got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

Just sayin'.

If we believe that companies have their culture (I certainly do) then it's not so surprising that someone may or may not be "culture-fit".

However, I'd question the health of the organization if the so-called culture is in the way that people dress or trim their facial hair. It is hopefully much more related to things like company's structure, employee's attitude and interpersonal skills, people's approach to team management, problem solving methods, work ethics etc.

I get the sentiment, but don't you think punching someone in the face is a bit too much?

Only if you're under the impression Mr. Internet Tough-guy would actually do it.

I doubt he'd actually punch someone in the face, it's a bit of bravado to make a point: a lot of the "company culture" doesn't have anything to do with making the business work and more to do with people's personal preferences.

Obviously yes I'm kidding.

I think it's extremely insulting to disregard the years I have put into perfecting my craft because I don't have the same outward appearance/attitude as everyone else.

No matter how much of a cultural fit you are, that doesn't get the work done, the expertise does.

I work at a team right now that has: Indian men/women in their mid 40's. Young teenage interns from. People ranging from Indian, to Asian, to White, to Jewish, to men, to women, to gay, to straight, you name it. We have not gotten along better. It really doesn't matter.

"Culture fit" is just a poor patch to cover up insecurity.

Yep, and obviously I figured you wouldn't actually go punch someone in the face. It's just that I'd like to see that declaration made less often :)

I worry that "culture fit" leads to group think.

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