from Hacker News

Never, Ever Compromise: Hiring For Culture Fit

by yarianluis on 1/8/13, 5:21 PM with 29 comments

• by guylhem on 1/8/13, 7:12 PM

  This is weird to read. What caught my eye:

  "For an early stage, raw startup, your hiring focus should be on homogeneity."

  then right away:

  "You should be encouraging a diversity of origins (gender, ethnicity, etc.)"

  I don't really care about one side of the argument or another, (homogeneity, heterogeneity) or even prejudices - but this seems inconsistent.

  If you are advocating cultural homogeneity, except for political correctness or legal reasons (ie to avoid being sued by applicant you rejected because of their gender or ethnicity), why do you argue for diverse origins ?

  Be consistent with yourself - it's A or B.

  If it's A and B you may not really have an argument.

  And I would really, really like to see facts supporting either homogeneity or heterogeneity. So far all I've seen are best described as case reports - no real trials with enough samples to have a good statistical power. Make teams of 100 persons, standardize on competence (SAT, whatever) then try and compare different mix of gender or ethnicities and pick up the top performing mixes. Do that multiple times. Then give a conclusion.

  That's an argument I will be able to believe.

  EDIT: some clarification - I don't care what anyone thinks/look like/believes as long as the person can deliver more than it costs, but I'm willing to consider that if conclusive evidence exists. The best I've read so far is a positive effect of homogeneity towards cooperation against others (parochialism).

  EDIT2: to avoid statistical backslash, I realize that due to higher standard deviation in small samples of a given population, underrepresented genders or ethnicities may show a higher variance - hence the need to standardize beforehand on competence to select test subjects over a threshold and reduce this bias.

• by jayferd on 1/8/13, 8:37 PM

  <quote> [Inexperienced people] Work long hours. Inexperienced people make up for inexperience with enthusiasm, and often don't have much of a life. This does not necessarily make them more productive then experienced people, but the enthusiasm and energy is often infectious and helps shape the company culture. </quote>

  If I'm reading this right, this is awful. Just awful. You want to hire inexperienced people to "infect" the culture with a habit of working long hours. I have a seriously bad reaction to this because I was that guy. I came into a company, was super excited to work there, worked long hours like everyone else, and all of a sudden I had no life outside of work. I don't plan to do that again.

• by alanctgardner2 on 1/8/13, 7:00 PM

  I think "culture fit" makes this sound more specific than it is: it's mostly about interpersonal relationships within the team, and enthusiasm for the problem domain. For some reason the west-coast startup cargo cult seems to think that every company needs to be a unique and beautiful snowflake which offers niche perks and only hires (for example) ginger rock-climbers with astigmatism who like Devo.

  The fact of the matter is, half of this article is about the new employee getting along with your team. This doesn't necessarily require common interests, it's just about having similar communication styles, and to an extent values. The beer test is an excellent way to establish this.

  The other half is about hiring enthusiastic recruits, especially the 'green and keen' fresh out of college, who are willing to sacrifice their lives to ship. I personally don't agree with sleeping under your desk every night, or living in a perpetual crunch, but I'm lucky enough to have an interesting, challenging job where I want to work on related projects at home. If an employee is interested in the problem they're solving, they'll be more productive, regardless of whether they spend 8 hours or 12 hours at the office.

  In short, I like all of the content in the article, but 'culture fit' makes it seem like a mystical x factor, when it's really common sense.

• by pnathan on 1/8/13, 7:25 PM

  Hire inexperienced people? That is a recipe for making old mistakes experienced people would know to avoid. It's also totally crass to hire newbies because they will put in overtime.

  If you want to build a culture, build a culture people want to buy into, even old hands.

• by luser001 on 1/8/13, 7:04 PM

  This whole article should have been prefaced with a giant 72-pt IMHO and suffixed with a 72-pt YMMV.

  I was amazed at recommendations #4 and #5: reward somebody for "fitting in" etc. (!!!!!!!)

  I highly recommend Andy Grove's "High Output Management" if you're really interested in building a high-performance organization. It's a highly objective book: don't waste time on voodoo like "Intriguingly, in a "social" environment, the candidate would often show more of their "true colors". Especially if beer was involved."

• by sweettea on 1/8/13, 8:02 PM

  I recently got a job without the beer test, and I'm glad. I understand the need to fit in, and I genuinely think I do, but I, like many others, don't deal well socializing with enormous groups of strange people. If subjected to a beer test, it'll be super-painful for me, and I'll be ordinately quiet --- because what social situation wants an outsider to dominate the conversation? But going out for beer with one or two people, or having a conversation with one or two people in the office in a traditional interview setting, is a much more natural social situation and I believe shows much better how I'll get along with the company.

• by troebr on 1/8/13, 8:06 PM

  hire inexperienced people because they will put in overtime and will be more willing to accept your culture -> hire inexperienced people because they are more easily influenced. I don't think I would be a culture fit in the company of someone who thinks like that. A job should be beneficial to both the employee and the employer, and more experienced hires would be able to point out dysfunctions instead of blindly accepting anything (see the monkeys and the ladder experiment - whether it is true or not, it illustrates the point).

• by genericresponse on 1/8/13, 8:14 PM

  This article sounds distinctly like a list of excuses for why your company isn't equal opportunity. A huge list of rationalizations about why you chose the white, young, middle to upper-middle class, guy over other candidates.

• by motters on 1/8/13, 8:22 PM

  Cohesive, insular cultures are more likely to suffer from group-think and to tolerate bad behavior.

  This article seems like bad advice because when everyone thinks alike it's more difficult to spot and correct mistakes.

• by Torgo on 1/8/13, 10:38 PM

  Will I fail the post-beer test if I don't care for drinking culture? What if I'm a Muslim, Mormon, or just a teetotaller? Why do these places seem to have the same beer-culture?

  I think this is a new thing? I didn't see it so prevalent ten years ago, now it seems like every conference, every workplace enjoys imbibing tons and tons of beer.

• by freework on 1/8/13, 11:08 PM

  I think the problem is that with Silicon Valley startups, failure is the norm. Instead of optimizing for maximum skill when hiring, they optimize for maximum "bro-ness". You take that 7 figure investor money, get yourself a swanky downtown San Francisco office, and spend the days drinking beer with your "startup bros" until the money runs out. Then you write your "why my startup failed" postmortem blog post, then start the process all over again.

• by pacaro on 1/8/13, 7:44 PM

  I understand the point, but there is a challenge that has to be met, particularly if you are trying to build a consumer product. It is very easy to fall into the "Inmates are Running the Asylum"[1] trap, the product looks good within the team and to like minded customers but is missing something (or everything) for the broader customer base. This lead an entire industry to spend decades building products that only techies could love...

  [1] http://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/dp...

• by tewolde on 1/8/13, 9:46 PM

  No! No. No.

  Find what you need, and hire for talent...all else is smoke and noise!

• by KevinMS on 1/8/13, 10:16 PM

  This is satire, right?

• by ucee054 on 1/9/13, 1:32 AM

  Early on, you want to hire people with common perspectives and goals who are all pulling in the same direction. (Note: this does not mean want you want clones or group think).

  That's EXACTLY what it means. Someone following these ideas will end up hiring sheep. What a stupid article.