Ask HN: What does culture fit mean?

a.) is this someone I could enjoy working with: personality, openness, intellectual honesty, work ethic, passion for work, etc.

b.) is this person higher on give or take: seemingly very interested in contractual benefits they will receive, seemingly uninterested in value they can add

c.) technical culture: e.g., are you walking into a “move fast and break things” company with a “six-nines-reliability” mentality, or vice-versa?

I think it may also be a code word for “You’re too old and we don’t really know how to deal with aging developers because putting it honestly would violate federal employment law.“ This is somewhat speculative, because I have been self-employed for the last 20 years.

A twist in the plot is that I am an almost 60 year-old developer and completely understand the attitude. Furthermore, I think it should be legal to discriminate that way. In my experience, many of the older developers I know are utterly brilliant. I just paid a guy in his 50s $24,000 for 160 billed hours of work, and I know it was an absolute bargain. It saved my company.

Yet I have encountered many more who displayed what seems to me to be an entitled attitude. They talk as if they should be able to make the same money they always did without updating their skill sets. Like professional athletes, we are paid much more than the median salary because we can do things most people can’t. And like professional athletes, once we can no longer deliver the goods, we haven’t earned exorbitant pay levels.

1.) its the usual euphemism used to make you feel bad for the company's fuck ups, it goes along with "not enough experience". If your company is focused on years of experience, instead of skills/talent/potential, your setting yourself up for disaster. Those companies don't become the google's of the world because of their shortsightedness and inability to plan properly for the future by treating their employee's well. 2.) Some questions are valid such as tell me a time when you weren't able to deliver to the customer (Amazon), others are BS such as "why do you want to work here," (the proper response is, it doesn't matter now since I don't want to anymore). 3.) Many are evaluating you on valid HR nightmares such as inability to filter out your personal life from the business life but many I've seen are just seeing if your going to try to move up faster in the corporate ladder compared to them. B managers hire C teams, A managers hire A+ teams.

Ironically many people doing the interviews don't like the competition, so they don't pass the candidate, who can call them out on it? Nobody really.

I'll be blunt. Culture fit often means sexism, ageism, and racism in silicon valley.

Well, it's more if you fit well with the interviewer.

One example was when I was interviewing for a game developer. I wanted to see something that was more like a tower defense game, which the interviewer wanted to move away from.

Sometimes they give you a description of the product and see your response - are you excited, confused, scared? Does your vision for this product align with the project manager's vision?

Like some others have mentioned, it's a way to see if you fit with their pace. Meaning if you're willing to work 80 hours/week or dedicate a lot of time to the office.

Some offices have the exact opposite culture - they like to work short hours but also need people who are extremely efficient and able to squeeze 100% out of those hours.

Some roles prefer people who adhere strictly to protocol.

Some are extremely flexible; we've worked with full time engineers who start work at 4 PM (stand up meeting) and end work at 9 AM (daily commit). They didn't care about the longer hours, only wanted to have a nightly cigarette and work when it's colder outside.

There's also different approaches to training. Some companies prefer to train on the job. Some expect you to train in your free time. Some will hire external trainers regularly. Some will stick to tried and true technology; others will encourage you to experiment. Some jobs even literally try to hire people who they can trust to experiment, so the boss/manager doesn't have to.

For me culture fit is working culture fit. I’m always looking for someone who can get on board with the way we work as a team. I don’t care if we can become friends or not, if you are willing to work long hours or not (I’d rather not) as long as we can work efficiently together and rely on each other to get the job done.

In early stages, for instance, I would look for people who have a shipping fast mentality. In later stage for people who value technical excellence.

Everything else is at best childish and naive, and too often discriminating against certain persons who would actually be a valuable asset. A grown up can work efficiently in a team without going to Thursday beers every week.

Its a buzzword that essentially means "is the candidate similar to me?".

It can be a cover for clear racism/sexism/agesim etc. but can also be used to discriminate on less clear terms - i.e. maybe all the co-founders at a startup went to Yale, Harvard, MIT etc. but the candidate is a self taught programmer who comes from a poor background in the Midwest. If the candidate shows that he is just like the co-founders (i.e. has the same interests, outlook on life etc.) then he will be a culture fit. But if the candidate has four kids at the age of 29, goes to church every sunday, hunting on the weekends etc. he will not be a culture fit.

In essence, "culture fit" is the result of a company hiring candidates based on aspects of them that should not even be considered at all. It shouldn't matter if the candidate has a large family or no family at all, if they candidate is religious or not, what the candidate political beliefs are - these are all things that should really be kept out of the workplace.

Is everyone doing 80h weeks and yelling at each other? Then they need people who can fit into that.

Is everyone super nice, and there is a "no asshole" policy then they need people that won't break that.

Does everyone tend to be social, lots of social events etc? Need to fit into that?

Or is it a pure work ethic place where you need to be pounding keys every minute until it's time to clock out? Same again they want people to fit into that.

As said in a lot of the replies here, it simply mean for the interviewer : "Can this person work in our team" outside of the inherent quality of the person. For programmers for instance, are you the type that want to documents every single line, create complicated interfaces ? Are you a hacker type, delivering as fast as you can, knowing that you'll be able to fix it later if a new requirement comes in? There's nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Depending on the scale of the products, the tech debt and the organisation, it's obviously going to be different. You don't hire the same developer to work on a startup prototype than to work on a 5 years old enterprise application.

Basically, you're asking: "okay, that person has the necessary skills. But will they be happy working with us and will we be happy working with them".

As other comments mentioned, it can be other thing than technical culture fit. Is can be taste in culture for instance. Is the team a bunch of geeks that regularly play games together and would not fit well with someone who likes sport for instance. Or are they heavy drinkers, having a pint every evenings, and you should fit into that too.

If the company has issues (ever-changing requirements, overtime is the norm, technical debt is never addressed etc.), it can also be a way to predict if the candidate will be able to wistand those, or will leave before the end of their probation.

It means different things to different teams, but it generally means you will fit and vibe well with the team. There are teams that are fast paced who work a lot, 10-12hrs days is the norm. Getting called at night or weekend is the norm too. Everyone will not be a right culture fit for that. If you want a regular 9-5, want work life balance, such a team will be a terrible fit for you.

There are teams that work 9-5 Mon-Fri. If you're a workaholic that works from 8am-8pm, sending email at 12am, working on weekend and vacation, you will be a bad culture fit for such a team.

Imagine a team working on a Java project, and the entire team are die hard FreeBSD fans, but you're a die hard OSX or Windows fan and will not change your OS for nothing. Bad culture fit.

Team likes to go out, have a drink during happy hour. You don't. Bad culture fit.

It just means that you will clash with the team period, professionally or not.