The "culture" of an open source tech shop is vastly different than a typical .Net tech shop - the clients are different, the dress codes are often more strict in the .net shops, the hierarchy and "feel" is far more corporate... Those are different worlds, and trying to stick someone from one into the other inevitably doesn't work well... at least not optimally..
As someone with a DOD-heavy work background I have experienced firsthand that kind of arbitrary rejection.
I have a lot of friends with plenty of DoD, NMCI stuff... but you know, they show up to an interview for a digital agency in full dress with a perfectly pruned resume and pressed shirts... because that's the culture they are used to, and it gives off the wrong vibe. What it shows, to the other side, is that your priorities are in those places... that you see those things as important... and its a turn-off to places that are more fluid and open. I wouldn't work anywhere where I had to wear dress shoes and a collard shirt every day. It would be a BAD culture fit, because I don't value those things, as I see absolutely no connection between my clothes and my output as a developer...
One of those friends with heavy DoD/Corp background, i helped him get his job, he loves it now, because hes good with the more relaxed culture at the agency he's at now... but it was like pulling teeth to get him to show up for an interview not dressed like he was going to a wedding...
We should hire for culture-UNfit. Do you think differently? Are you going to give me options nobody else here would have thought of? Do you have experience with technologies that nobody else here does? Are you going to be able to fill in some of the blind spots and vulnerabilities that would stay open if I just hired someone identical to everyone else here?
Hiring another person just the same gets me the ability to do a little more of the same. Hiring someone different gets me something new.
At one job we had some people hired who, from the stories I'm reading here, wouldn't have been good "culture fits" at a lot of companies. They were older (50+). Didn't hang out after work. Came from a different background (cellphones).
Instead, one brought us much improved coding standards that greatly accelerated our development process (by greatly reducing our debugging time). The other was just ludicrously efficient as a programmer and knew the ins and outs of embedded like no one else and single-handedly rewrote one of our major projects (which the bosses had been toying with hiring a consultant to do).
But they weren't like the rest of us. Single, 20-something, male (not universally white, we had a decent mix there). They didn't hang out with us on Saturday night. They didn't go to lunch with us. They didn't game with us when we had random game nights.
But as professionals, they brought expertise and experience and mentorship that we desperately needed.
You can have an entirely different skill set, knowledge base, experience base, and be a similar fit, culturally.
But you know, if you have an office full of people who enjoy spending their time together, who play games together after work, who go to lunch and laugh and talk, who listen to music out loud and don't prefer to have a library-quiet office space, then hiring someone who prefers to be a loner, who doesnt play well with others, who is arrogant, who needs absolute silence to work... those are pain points.
Culture and skills/experience are not at all related.
If you think you truly have such powers as to steer precisely how humans interact with each other across different departments, contexts, on/off hours, and their cumulative personalities, then I'm going to have to politely ask you to put down the keyboard for a minute and consider the idea that humans aren't programmable robots. How can you consider this idea? Easy!
Take any culture you are personally grooming right now. What makes you think you are the authority on defining the borders and structure of that culture? Are you the appointed cultural architect? And if you think you are, then you are no longer talking about the actual culture that is organically growing around you with each and every interaction of minds. You are talking about what you THINK the culture should be based on your position of influence.
And that model of what you THINK culture is... is not the actual culture it's attempting to represent. That position has a name: It's not cultural architect. It's the morality police and it's a cheap cop-out that stops you from actually exploring your own assumptions of how your peers are engaging.
To you: Unity = strength
To me: Unity = stagnation
So while you hide your reasons of not wanting to work with me based on "culture fit" and "not being someone you want to work with", I can define PRECISELY why I wouldn’t' want to work with you. I'm forced to justify my assumptions. You can just silently reinforce them.
And that's why the whole "culture fit" craze is bullshit.
Although, I must say, he did seem to be a fairly decent developer, as far as I could tell by talking with him over two days.
This results in a "clean" rejection, where the rejected don't have traction for arguing that they'll "change" or "not do that again" when the rejecters simply don't want to deal with them anymore (for whatever their reasons, rational or otherwise). It's certainly not productive from the rejected's perspective, they truly might not know what they did to offend/displease their coworkers, but it can prevent awkward situations.
By not including "real" reasons for rejected, your signaling the the rejected that your not interested in conversing about your decision and that your decision is final, regardless of the logic used to reach it (I think all of these are implicit properties when you don't share your logic behind a decision).
As an added bonus, the same strategy works when rejecting people in your personal life, so there's also the societal familiarity/subtext that comes along with the generic rejection that can further emphasize the undesirability of continued interaction and the finality of the decision.
I still hate it, but I understand it.
He actually missed his start day, without notice, now that I remember, and started late.
I looked up his music scene and realized he'd been at a rave in another state all weekend, and was clearly hungover and irritable.
Neither one of those are captured in the "data-driven" hiring process; however, they are key in our particular company's culture. And yes... years of experience can be dismissed simply if the candidate thinks they're above everyone else.
"professionalism" is one particular set of features of culture (and different people use the term to describe slightly different feature sets, but each definition is a set of culture features), and "work style" is a synonym for workplace culture.
"They Loved You" (No they were lukewarm at best but they're being polite at this point.)
"Wouldn't be a good fit" (Not their responsibility to point out your flaws, some of which were subtle, some were obvious so keeping it brief and to the point. We know we can find somebody better or already have.)
This applies to onsite interviews obviously, not initial phone screens.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911
a little over a year ago. The short answer was that we couldn't find a single thing that this interview helped with.
And since then I have yet to hear anyone give a reasonable answer as to what a cultural fit interview provides.
I mean by the time you are ready to hire someone, they've met the team and the team has already approved. We've already given them the hard sell on why they should work for us, infact this is what I spend half our initial phone screen doing, just selling the company.
Almost all cultural fit interviews seem to be a form of asking: "Can we figure out if this person will dedicate all their waking hours to our company", and that's just really sad.
Speaking only technically will give you that person's tech skills... that person's non-tech skills and nuances will actually have a huge effect on their performance and that of those they work closely with.
Something powerful comes out of that - you learn intuitively what a person's true priorities are, and they do the same. You get a "feeling" about them and how they will incorporate into the team. those are just as important
For us fit interviews make sense enough that we started doing them for every candidate, instead of just for ones that passed the technical parts, and I'll try to explain ... Maybe you can see something that could be useful for you.
There's ~1000 people in our IT (and we are hiring - poke me if your interested), 50+ different nationalities, 95% of us are expats, we mostly do Perl code on BackEnd, expect everyone to have good commercial awareness (put ideas on backlog, push back on ProductOwner ...etc) and overall try to have the least bureaucracy/processes as possible.
You can write code, push and roll it out into production within 30ish minutes - with no stamp/approval required (though on call sysadmin will ask you why are you doing it at 6am on a Sunday).
IMHO quite an interesting setup for being majority part of publicly traded group (Nasdaq: PCLN).
Most often you're not interviewed by people you'll work with (interviewers are not from same team).
Fit interviewers focus/check commercial sense/awareness, motivation, flexibility regarding approaching things like tools and technology (we don't introduce new technology unless you can make a good commercial argument for it), follow up on anything raised by recruiters and technical interviewers, and also answer candidates questions.
Indeed most of reasons we would not hire someone are noticed in other parts of interview as well. Besides being the ones who answer the most questions to candidates (besides recruitment) - fit interviews tend to be helpful for cases where everyone else is on the fence.
If someone aced the tech parts - it's extremely rare fit interview is so bad we don't make an offer.
BTW - everything mentioned is my personal interpretation ...
If anyone has specific questions I'll try to answer them.
Companies take note: be a fun place, but protest too much about your culture and risk becoming a weird hive-minded cult.
