“Cultural fit” is bullshit

Probably going to get down-voted to hell for this on a place like HN, but here comes reality.

The legal and idealistic views of how people should act like have nothing to do with how they (we) actually act and behave. Humans are animals. We want to be around and work with people we like, who happen to be people that are most similar to us. Cultural fit is more than a thing, it's an instinct. You can reason about how it might be wrong but you can't shut it down. When are people most productive? When they feel part of an "inner circle", a company "us" vs "them" (competition) mentality. Teams with the strongest sense of unity tend to be among the most productive and group cohesion depends on the human factor. You can inspire cohesion by telling people how they should love and get along with everyone and having non-stop team building activities, which works - kind of. Or you can put together a group of people that will naturally form strong bonds and work well together.

Interestingly, only bigger corporations reap the best of both worlds: satisfying the trendy PC urges while still having optimally (naturally) functioning teams by forming many offices / silos of "identity groups". For people who think this is rubbish or work in a mash-up of an office, you will notice that people naturally gravitate towards those who are most similar to them and spend their after-hours / lunch break with them. Not saying it's right, but this is how things work. More importantly, it's rubbish that we are required by law to do the opposite. If you start a company with a couple of guys you grew up with and it works great, all of you are pulling 12 hour days because you genuinely enjoy being there, have open conflict in the office so you can get it out of the way and move on, etc.

The next thing you know this product you and your friends built is racking in 5 digits a month, so you hire a few more people - usually friends of friends - to help out. A year or two later, you're up to 6 digits and you need to hire more people, but now you are required by law to hire one of every minority and center out the gender ratio 50/50. For all the talk of race and gender "blindness" / "equality", mandates to have certain numbers and percentages of each are extremely hypocritical. The real question is are these people really racist / sexist / [trendy label here] or do they just want to be able to work with people they enjoy being around? In the end, "Cultural fit" is the last bastion of maybe having some wiggle room to hire people you actually want to hire into a company you built.

>>> Many HR professionals know the unstructured interview has little value for predicting employee performance, yet persist in using this discredited technique. Why? Two reasons are commonly given.

And there's the third, which is 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM'.

Yes, in the HN community it's widely accepted that the typical approach is suboptimal. But HN is a niche.

Outside this niche, many people still think it's a good approach as they probably haven't witnessed any different. Or they have no substantial incentives to try new approaches because they might get loads of blame if a bad hire is made (it's your fault because you tried these fancy interviewing thigs!).

Therefore, if the approach will ever change widely, outside our niche), a decade probably won't be enough.

For dry academia, Lauren A. Rivera's papers are pretty entertaining reads:

http://www.asanet.org/journals/ASR/Dec12ASRFeature.pdf http://ann.sagepub.com/content/639/1/71.abstract http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0276562410...

It's pretty astounding that the people advising the largest companies in the world make their own hiring decisions based on whether they think the candidate is a "tool" (their words) or not.

Cultural fit is a thinly veiled excuse to not hire perfectly qualified people usually because of some (usually illegal) prejudice that can't be expressed another way. It's a way to skirt the law and a simple reason to turn down applicants that can't be questioned.

It also seems to refer to expected traits of not only applicants but current employees that cannot be mandated by contract explicitly. I have seen it argued that not working weekends went against the culture of a company and therefore there was a bad cultural fit. What a load of B.S. It seems these cultural values into which one must fit are always negative ones from the point of view of the employee. Free work. Limited, narrow thinking. Even pleasing and worshipping the boss. I have heard of very few companies that value vacation as their cultural values and would turn away people who overwork themselves into burnout.

Either way, it's something toxic that companies would be much better without.