Is ‘culture fit’ merely a code word for unethical discrimination?

It can be, although I think the root cause is simply the 6-round sudden-death interviews. Social conformity is a major factor there no matter how you slice it.

>Prove me wrong.

I can't, I agree with you.

Company "culture" is whatever management decides it is. Unlike real, organic cultures, company cultures are engineered and dictated from the top, and employees don't alter it (as members of organic cultures do) but are merely expected to conform to it. Amazonians didn't create Amazon's culture, collectively, it is literally the cult of Jeff Bezos, and is "peculiar" by mandate.

So "culture fit" is just a meaningless box into which to throw the personal prejudices of whomever is hiring you (or choosing not to hire you) and to provide them with sufficient plausible deniability, because they can't just say they don't hire anyone over 30, or that they would rather not have women or certain ethnicities around, because it makes them uncomfortable.

Yes, that, but also just not liking someone. I feel that the sexism and racism in our industry are important parts of a larger pattern, which is simply that if someone doesn’t express ideas the same way you do, or look/act how you think a “nerd” or “hacker” should, then they’re not one. Women and non-white people are likely to get caught in that, but so might a white man who just doesn’t talk in a way that codes as “nerdy”. God forbid if they could be considered a “bro”, the nerd’s mortal enemy.

And so you say they’re not a good fit, and that’s that. It can’t be proven incorrect because culture fit is a nebulous idea to begin with. It’s a catch-all for whatever you don’t like, basically.

"Cultural fit" means something like "shares our values". That's something like:

conservative compliance vs. going right to the edge of the law

meticulous design and testing vs. move fast and break things

command-and-control vs. self-organization

IM vs. voice calls

9-5 vs. flexible hours blurring work and non-work time

likes the same kind of music as me vs. doesn't

Some of those seem okay to me to consider, and others don't. I don't see a bright line. I'd tend to agree that "cultural fit" with no further explanation tends to mean something bad.

I've worked at several companies and I've never really seen culture fit used in the way that you're describing. In the case of smaller companies and startups, it's generally just boiled down to "Can this person work directly with stakeholders to provide value for the company, and will they take initiative and ownership over their work?"

It certainly can be. At its core, the term basically means oen of three things:

1. We don't like you and we don't know why

Or

2. We don't like you and don't want to tell you why because the reason is against their law/might lead to a lawsuit.

Or finally:

3. We don't like you but want to sugar coat it a bit because we don't want to make you extremely annoyed/upset.

In some cases, that can really be a codeword for discrimination, since telling someone they're not hired because of their race/gender/age/nationality/whatever is against the law. But in other cases, it can often just be that the company has one way of working/prefers one environment and the candidate has another. If someone just doesn't get along with the people already at the company, well that's not necessarily discrimination if they don't get hired by that company.

So yeah, it depends really.

Culture fit certainly isn't just good/bad attitude. It's whether the way people do their jobs is compatible with the other people. Some companies release early and often, while some test thoroughly before releasing. Some have long meetings, some have short standups. Some start work early, some work late into the evening. Any of those styles can work as long as people agree. Considering culture fit means trying to hire people that share the same style so they can work together effectively.

Culture fit is also a way of excluding jerks. You encounter some abrasive, abusive, or misogynistic personalities in tech. People usually don't want to say "this candidate is a jerk", so they use "bad culture fit" as a euphemism. Once the answer is no-hire, the details don't matter anyway.

Building a team that works well together is extremely difficult. Unless you've actually hired dozens of people and seen them either work well as a team or kill productivity with interpersonal conflicts, better not to sit in judgement of people who have.

I'm a recruiter and have heard this more times than I can remember as the reason given for why a candidate is not suitable.

I think it is simply a convenient, sufficiently vague, unarguable reason to say no.

It's important to understand that people feel very uncomfortable rejecting another person, and in recruiting, companies really prefer not to give any reason at all - this is because they don't want the candidate to come back arguing with the reasons given for the rejection.

So "not a cultural fit" is just an easy way to say no thanks, whilst giving a "reason" that can't be argued with.

It's not discriminatory.

"Prove" is a high bar. But for example, I once worked in a factory where everyone was cautious with what they said and how they said it (in a way which your question is not, btw), so as not to hurt others' feelings. Another factory, in the very same building, had a culture of saying everything as bluntly as possible, often with profanity involved.

Same industry, same demographic mix, same company even. Very different cultures (which, interestingly enough, both worked well). Then, they merged the two factories into one organization, and you saw that "culture fit" was not at all an abstraction; the first year was very rough for all concerned, and a lot of people quit.

Also, in this case, because it was a bunch of engineers with a similar demographic mix, not a code word for racism or any other unethical practice. It was culture; I can think of no better word for it.

It's definitely a mixed bag across the industry and even across individuals at the same company.

To some people culture fit might mean "I'd hang out with this person on Sundays." This of course is problematic and can let in all kinds of biases leading to discrimination.

Ideally culture fit is about whether a person can fit in to the processes in place. Do they value testing? Are they comfortable with the level of ambiguity that will be found in their assignments? Etc.

I'm in favor of the latter, but it needs to be evaluated based on direct questioning to limit the impact of biases i.e. "Would you be comfortable being required to have 100% test coverage on the code you write?" I've certainly seen folks come out of an interview confident that someone wouldn't be comfortable with ambiguity just because they said that at their current job they are given detailed specs to implement.

No disagreement here.

"Culture fit" is a lazy term that, at best, means easy compatibility of work style. Normally, though, it means "like me", and from there it's a pretty short road to unethical forms of discrimination.

I would argue that most companies really want/need "culture add" and "values fit". The stated values of the company tend to at least be aspirational and exclusive of things you don't want at your company. But the culture is an emergent aspect of the people who happen to be there, what they're into (good or bad), and how they prefer to interact. If you only want people who fit into that box, you may be numerically growing, but you're stagnant in perspective.

Yeah, it's mostly thinly veiled discrimination and/or "won't put up with a wildly toxic culture".

Mate, if you’re going to be the pc police here why don’t you put your money where your mouth is and take a risk by offering us an alternative. Oh, what was that? Nothing. You’re a nothing person with no ideas just criticisms and victimisms. Shut up mate.

Culture means something specific: Shared beliefs and behaviors within a social group, but hiring managers or entrepreneurs use "culture" to make up something vague about not liking the candidate. When in fact, saying a candidate is not a culture fit, it should mean the candidate "does not share our social group's beliefs and behaviors"

I have definitely seen a co-worker at my current job use "culture fit" as a way to discriminate.

I personally believe it is a way to discriminate. If you interview someone and you can't give specifics as to why you don't like them other than culture fit, it's something you are scared to say out loud.

It can be. Some companies (famous example:google) use "culture fit" and "share our values" to discriminate based on political views or other criteria which if they were to be specific about it,then they would break multiple employment laws.

But some have that for a good reason. I applied at a tech company recently whose product I am a fan of. Did well on the phone and in person technical interview. But after that, they kept asking how I like to work and how I felt about open office spaces(told them I can deal with it so long as I can put headphones on while doing technical work that needs concentration and that I felt some tasks are best dealt as a team while some should be developed and matured before involving others). Needless to say, I haven't heard back from them. But my point is that even I felt a bit of a cultural incompatibility( I was willing to make it work but they saw it as unworkable I guess).

Frankly, I don't see how a 50 year old person (not myself,I'm in my 20s) can be culturally compatible with people young enough to be his/her grand child. Or how a coder from asia can have the same work culture as west cost americans.

There is this view that the culture and values made all these tech unicorns what they are. Maybe that's true but I keep wondering whether or not the same group of smart people but culturally diverse could have acheived the same goal so long as they all agree to use rationality,communicate openly(in an inclusive way) and agree on what the goal and their role in the organization is.

I like to think silicon valley startups to be more or less as culturally exclusive as 80s era IBM,bell labs or Xerox. Which is why I keep doubting the culture narrative. Smart people make smart companies and smart enough people should be smart enough to make cultural diversity work (my humble opinion).

As a manager who does a lot of interviews and has run teams with a lot of different working dynamics, culture fit is something I used to describe a collection of social skills and dynamics at play in my team, with the company as a whole, and with our clients. There are a large number of ways people can interact well, and there are a number of specific things an employee might do to make these dynamics strained. If, in the course of an interview, I can identify a large number of these, then I have effectively identified someone who will take up a large portion of my time in coaching & mentoring to smooth out those habits, or who will take up my time in dealing with inter-office conflict. If that's the case, I will turn that person down based on a culture fit and choose another candidate that can present both the technical skills required as well as the soft-skills that allow us all to work more effectively.

This is my interpretation of those terms and how I use it personally. My basis for behavioral traits is based on personal experience as well in working at a large number of companies in various roles, industries, and positions. I don't believe that it is at all discrimination because I'm using my best judgement for who can work most effectively with my team. That's just smart business.

I used to think ‘culture fit’ as a reason not to hire someone was nonsense, however, I left an employer not long ago after they refused to deal with someone toxic that was hurting the team attitude. It led to some massive attrition and made me realize there’s certainly something to idea of ‘culture fit’, but I don’t know how it can be assessed so easily over an interview process. This employee actually started off quite well and seemed like a fit at the time but eventually it became clear they lacked the growth mindset we needed. So culture matters, yes, and attitudes affect team balance but I’m not sure that this is the same as a post-interview ‘culture fit’ rejection. In fact, it may actually be a matter of hiring at the right level of seniority to get the job done. That’s not a culture thing so much as knowing what you really need in an employee. You could easily hire someone who just wasn’t what you needed then blame ‘culture fit’ which seems like a bit of a cop out.

I've seen it both ways, I was on a hiring committee that interviewed a candidate who was techinically a great hire, but he had a bad personality and kept correcting one of the other interviewers. We didnt hire him because of a culture fit.

I was on another committee one time where the candidate was muslim and had to pray during the four hour onsite technical interview. My boss said we couldn't hire him because he wouldn't be a good culture fit.

One of those teams I stayed on for 2 good years. The other I wish I had quit earlier.

I think so. I work in the government sector, and the culture fit is never more abused than here. Everything is highly political and no matter the office, political ideology, race, gender, etc. if you don’t fit the political culture, you’re out.

I’m in a fast-growing small startup. In my experience, there’s no such thing as “culture fit” in a 10-person company, because every single hire is going to change that culture.

To me, it doesn’t matter if the candidate “fits in” with today’s culture, it only matters if I will still want to work at the company after the new person is part of its culture.

If only you could actually predict this from interviews!

As is, all you can do is try to put the candidate in job-like scenarios and evaluate specific “culture” attributes like “is open to criticism” or “listens to collaborators” or “codes with a concern for future readers” or “has a positive attitude toward code reviews”. It’s still much easier to disqualify than to endorse on those criteria. Hiring is hard.

If you're serious about this and this isn't some "change my mind" meme, I'd recommend reading the culture documents of larger companies like Amazon. It's an attempt at standardizing how soft skills are evaluated and hired for. Basically, all interviews are an attempt to discern three things:

1. Can they do the job 2. Will they like the job 3. Will I like working with this person

The third is really where "culture fit" comes in. When you have multiple candidates that qualify for a role, how do you choose between them? You will naturally pick the person you hit it off with the most, which will more than likely be someone like yourself. It is definitely unconscious bias, but I'm not convinced it's unethical discrimination. This is the basis of all hiring ever...not just tech.

People are going to prefer who they choose to prefer. You're not going to build a better team or get better hires by consciously picking people you or the team doesn't want to work with...at least in collaborative fields. To call that unethical is disingenuous.

The way to minimize the influence of "culture fit" is doing more upfront thinking in the "can they do the job" category so you aren't just choosing between two people who both know javascript. Usually the only soft skill I see on a job description is "effective communicator," which is fluff. Think seriously about what it means to contribute to a team, how they contribute, and how you want teams to reach consensus and work together.

I previously worked for a company that spent $5-10k psychometrically testing each potential hire in 1 on 1 sessions with a psychologist after they had passed an initial interview. The tests were a mix of general IQ (to ensure people actually had suitable mathematic and literary skills needed the role) but also quite a bit of personality testing. The company founders recognised the huge detrimental impact certain personality types could inflict on an organisation. So they spent considerable money and effort to try to detect and reject candidates that were likely to be passive aggressive, too dominating, inflexible etc. They actively favoured candidates that were able to demonstrate aptitude and personality traits aligned with being a team player, even if the candidate was less experienced for role (ie find quality people first, train them if necessary).

This was the best place I have ever worked. Problems (and successes) were shared. Internal conflict was very rare. If one person was overloaded, the team would work out who might be light on work at the moment and could assist. Work hours were very flexible - outputs not inputs were what mattered. We had a lot of autonomy and were encouraged to be creative and take some risks in developing new tools and services.

The employees were from a diverse range of ethnic and religious backgrounds. The male/female ratio was probably around 60/40 for a company of mostly engineers. Age of employee was mixed but favoured younger engineers. The company was a consultancy so it was a place people would work at to gain diverse experience then move on to specialist positions elsewhere. It was rare for older engineers to be looking to gain diversity of experience.

Given the personality types - this meant we had lots of really interesting discussions about different countries and cultures and life experiences. So "culture fit" at this company did not mean "the same as me" other that with respect to: will work hard, is intelligent enough, will be a team player.

Sadly, after a few years of awesome work life, some of the owners wanted to cash out and the company was acquired by a multi-national. The culture of the original company was quickly destroyed. No autonomy, ridiculous levels of authorisation (4-5 just to purchase $500 of IT equipment for example), competition from internal groups stealing clients, very few team players, inputs favoured over outputs (lots of "make work" going on). The transition experience really rammed home how real the Peter Principle is and the drawbacks of tall hierarchical management structures.

"Culture fit" to me means rejecting people that won't work within the organisational structure you are trying to build. Note that it doesn't mean non-team players should always be rejected. If you have a team of individuals that largely work in isolation and prefer to reduce communication to a minimum, hiring a team-oriented person could be detrimental.

As for "culture fit" being used as a cover for discrimination, I'm sure it happens. If someone is discriminating then they will want to cover their arse somehow and "culture fit" is vague enough that it can easily be used for that purpose.

Perhaps "personality fit" would be a better term for what I describe above? Though I have never heard it being used and I suspect a lot of-people in tech like to think that merit matters more and could find "personality fit" to be offensive.

You might have read in HN, in many threads, comments from people saying "I would NEVER work in a company that would do such things like X, Y, Z". The other day, the comments were about a company tracking the activity of every employee. Another day was about a company whose business model was invasive ads. Another thread was about a company forbidding work-from-home and expecting everyone to checkin at 8 am sharp. Another was about companies forbidding engineers to work on opensource on their spare time. The list goes on. These are all examples of "culture" in my mind. As one might say "I'll never work there, ever" - there are plenty of people that would and they do indeed. The difference is the "I would fit there". If I know that the company "requires" to work long hours, or doesn't want work from home, or expects you to be on call at any given time, or expect people to be brutally honest with each other - as interviewer, I would be mindful of someone who will not fit these criterias. And many of these criterias are not good or bad - see the being brutally honest vs we are respectful of everyone feeling: it's just that the "wrong fit" would be run over by the organization within weeks and would likely result in the employee to be dismissed. Everyone would lose.

Anecdotal data point: I'm working at a small startup right now, a bit over a dozen people, which is looking at hiring some web developers. It's been an interesting process. We have rejected a good chunk of applicants for culture fit. (And a few for attitude. And very many for not reading the damn job description.)

Here's why:

Most of us, to a T, are furry trash.

We want to hire someone who seems genuinely excited about the job, and kind of excited about us by extension, so we are making a good chunk of our decision based on culture fit.

Some of our interviews have fit right in. They seem ease. Planning some cosplay or other. Others have reacted quite a bit cooler to the atmosphere. (We're immersed pretty deeply in this weird pocket of the permissive California culture, which I figure must be pretty intense to walk into for a job interview if you're not used to it.)

The ethical bit: Both the primary groups we're hiring from, furry and nerdy, are predominately very white and very male. We seem to have a sort of multiplier effect going where both groups have some diversity but just through probability we don't see any applicants who are not the traditional white male programmer. We'd happily welcome anyone who did not match the visual template, who wasn't weirded out by us, but no one really has yet. I'm guessing we're running up against some sort of systemic discrimination, despite the fact that no one involved in the interaction is intentionally discriminating.

Take that all for what you will, I guess.

--Anonymouse