Peter Thiel once used "culture fit" to exclude people who liked playing basketball:

"PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. No PayPal people would ever have used the world “hoops.” Probably no one even knew how to play “hoops.” Basketball would be bad enough. But “hoops?” That guy clearly wouldn’t have fit in. He’d have had to explain to the team why he was going to go play hoops on a Thursday night. And no one would have understood him."

https://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183...

Gee, which racial demographic has an affinity for basketball? If you wanted to discriminate based on race, you can always find a "culture" proxy, like a hobby, fashion, speech pattern, etc. to use as an excuse, without citing race explicitly.

Or gender. Or class. Or "neuro-diversity". Or almost any trait you want to discriminate against.

You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit".

> Sure, we probably miss some good people, but we have a specific culture in place that we all enjoy, and I don't want to feel uncomfortable or have to walk on egg shells around my team.

So you'd reject a candidate because of comfort and enjoyment? Even though the candidate could make you tons of money? That's very discouraging.

> You may just be rude in an interview, and that will 100% result in me turning you down. It doesn't matter much to me if you're an "Aspie/ADD"

There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. A person with Asperger's communicates differently than a person without Asperger's. You chose to interpret that difference as rudeness. Instead of understanding the cause of the differences and adapting to it, you simply eliminated the candidate for the sake of your own comfort.

This doesn't matter to you but it should. Especially if you want to claim you don't discriminate based on factors the candidate can't change.

Do/would you hire any person who can answer your questions? There are plenty of smart people who are entirely unenjoyable people. Not liking someone is not discrimination.

> So you'd reject a candidate because of comfort and enjoyment? Even though the candidate could make you tons of money? That's very discouraging.

You seem to be implying that someone who is smart can obviously outperform people who are less smart. A good team is more than smart people, and a successful company is more than smart people. There is a big difference in the effectiveness of teams that are happy versus miserable. If a brilliant individual makes the rest of your team miserable, that's an awful tradeoff. If you think it's okay to do that, that's very discouraging.

> There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. A person with Asperger's communicates differently than a person without Asperger's. You chose to interpret that difference as rudeness. Instead of understanding the cause of the differences and adapting to it, you simply eliminated the candidate for the sake of your own comfort.

So instead of feeling insulted or threatened due to rude behavior, you should ignore it because it's your fault? If a guy is aggressively hitting on a girl, is it her fault? Should she change her behavior? Of course not. If you behave in a way that diminishes a collaborative work environment, why would the work environment be responsible for just putting up with the way you behave? You don't have to be the life of the party, but you have to at least act professional. If you can't pull that off for a single interview, you probably can't pull it off indefinitely in a professional environment.

This does matter to me, but the reality is that not everyone is a good fit for every setting. The whole point of interviewing is to find people who are going to help you move forward in the best way possible, and if you come into an interview and upset everyone you talk to, there are no data points to indicate that you being a smart asshole is going to help us move forward.

I've heard the same by some individuals who say they don't like people of color. Perhaps your line of reasoning is not complete.

Someone may be rude because they're aspie or because they're assholes, but the end result is the same: dealing with rudeness. I rather not.

This is the same reasoning that has been used in the past to deny opportunity: to people of colour, to women, to LGBTQ+... to people who didn't attend the "right" university or college...

This kind of active bias is harmful to the candidate, creates liability to the interviewer and the company, and also reinforces monoculture in an industry where being flexible and responsive to change has direct impact on the bottom line.

> These cries of discrimination are getting a bit out of hand.

I have often heard this from people in real life, from the cisgendered/male/caucasian/heteronormative/neuronormative, as if making space for people who aren't exactly like them is going to drive them into some lower social caste.

> You may just be rude in an interview, and that will 100% result in me turning you down.

That's fine, and your prerogative.

> It doesn't matter much to me if you're an "Aspie/ADD" or if you just found out your wife cheated on you, I don't want you around me all the time based off the only data point I have.

Do you and everyone at your organization always present a level-headed, calm, non-confrontational demeanour, or are you or anyone else ever ruffled by anything? Including lack of sleep, lack of caffeine, family crisis, friend crisis, personal crisis, unplanned bill, crashed computer, or anything else big or small? If not, perhaps there are unnecessary risks with making a major judgement based on a single data point.

> I think interviews aren't the best way to find out if someone is a going to be a good engineer, but to be a good team member, you have to have good interactions with the team.

How are you allowing the candidate the best chance to evaluate if you and your team will have perfect interactions with them?

> I have often heard this from people in real life, from the cisgendered/male/caucasian/heteronormative/neuronormative, as if making space for people who aren't exactly like them is going to drive them into some lower social caste.

There is a significant amount of people crying discrimination for everything being said that they don't love. People are less willing to join in discourse, and people are less willing to disagree about something and remain cordial. There are definitely people who are suffering from discrimination, but there are also people saying they are not succeeded because they are being discriminated against, while they actually suck at what their doing and need to work harder.

> Do you and everyone at your organization always present a level-headed, calm, non-confrontational demeanour, or are you or anyone else ever ruffled by anything? Including lack of sleep, lack of caffeine, family crisis, friend crisis, personal crisis, unplanned bill, crashed computer, or anything else big or small? If not, perhaps there are unnecessary risks with making a major judgement based on a single data point.

Nope, and no one expects anyone to be at their best 24/7. But if I get 1 hour to talk to you, and in that brief period of time you've shown me that you're rude, then I have to draw from the data points I have available to me. At the end of the day, there are a lot of people and not a lot of data points to make judgements from. This is a competitive environment, you have to be better than the other people being interviewed. If you're not, you don't get the job, even if you're having a bad day. A bad hire is really expensive and damaging to an organization, which makes red flags really important data points.

> How are you allowing the candidate the best chance to evaluate if you and your team will have perfect interactions with them?

There isn't a really good way to do it, you just give as many people as possible the chance to spend time with the candidate. No one expects all perfect interactions, just positive enough interactions that the team is okay with them. The team takes priority, not the candidate. It doesn't matter if you're smart, the team decides if you're an option to bring on.

On top of that, everyone gets this opportunity. It doesn't lean to everyone's strengths, but then some people will do better in the interpersonal parts and worse in the technical parts. There is a reason interviews involve multiple stages and multiple types of assessment. None of this is perfect, and you don't have to be perfect to get hired. You have to be good enough to enough people, and you have to be better than the other options.

Of course work isn't a social club, but it (usually) is a team environment, which means working closely with others to achieve a goal. And if a candidate can't avoid offending one person for one hour (with a strong incentive to do so!), it's a sign that they probably aren't going to be able to work as effectively in that team environment as someone who exhibits at least a baseline of social skills.

In a working environment where each developer can be siloed away to work on an individual module/task, document it, and toss it over the wall, then I'd agree it probably would make sense to go strictly off the performance numbers. But that doesn't look like any working environment that I've encountered (yet).

Being a good culture fit does not mean you have to like them so much that you're inviting them out for a beer. And in order to really be a long term competitive company and team, you need to be able to be unified first. If there is significant internal turmoil, or people are unmotivated, uncomfortable, threatened, etc. you will never be competitive. "Building character" is generally code for "deal with this crappy situation", and life is too short to make people miserable. You can get a diverse group of people without making all of them unhappy if you select for people who can work together.

A good manager will inspire motivation, bring comfort, foster a nonthreatening environment with an appropriate level of conflict, and shape a competitive force to be reckoned with. This does not mean creating a hug box. Not having a hug box doesn't mean employees have to be unhappy. It's bad managers whose ineffectiveness allows negative traits (which everybody has) to impact other employees.

In every thread where people go through great pains trying to clearly articulate why creating a cordial, amiable, and friendly work environment is important, people don't read that with charity. Instead, it's always twisted into "drinking buddy".

Let me try some different examples as models. Penn & Teller magicians are "not friends" or "drinking buddies".[0] However, they are friendly and cordial in their working relationship.

Another example is Golden State Warriors basketball teammates, Steph Curry & Klay Thompson.[1] They are very friendly with each other as work associates on the basketball court but they are also not drinking buddies. Steph is a family man with 3 small children. In contrast, Klay lives a bachelor lifestyle. Obviously, they don't need to share beers every week to be deadly effective as a team on the court.

It's perfectly acceptable to try and create those levels of employee camaraderie without being drinking buddies. The gp was talking about rejecting "rude people" that disrupt office harmony and that's acceptable to create cohesive teams like Penn & Teller and Steph & Klay.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=penn+%26+teller+not+friends

[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/warriors/comments/6avmse/ama_w_marcu...

There are various interviews with them throughout the years and they are quite genuinely friendly with each other. However, they have different personalities and they are not drinking buddies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv_Xkz9zepI&t=21m0s

They said their enduring relationship is based on professional respect instead of socializing.

Regardless, I still don't understand why not hiring "rude people" who you feel may disrupt the workplace is "discrimination". There is no special protected class of discrimination against unpleasant rude people! It also works both ways: if the candidate determines that the hiring manager and/or coworkers interviewing them is rude, they have a right to reject the company. There is no ethical standard to tolerate rude people from either side.

Again, to emphasize, the gp was talking about rude people; not black people nor women, etc. So the sibling comment twisting the gp's comment into racism and misogyny is putting words into his mouth he never said and degrading the HN discussion.

Ok, I see your confusion. Yes, disabilities are a protected class. However, being in a protected class does not provide the job candidate a free license to be rude and force other employees to suffer their rudeness.

And likewise, black race is protected class -- but the law doesn't require employers to hire "a black rude person".

Same for women or older-aged job candidates. Being a rude and disrespectful 65-year old female job candidate means the company can still reject on the grounds of being rude. This separation of reasons is allowed and is exactly how the discrimination laws are spelled out:

- may not Discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, marital status, or political affiliation.[1]

Note that Equal Opportunity Employment does not protect on the basis of rudeness. There are plenty of black applicants to hire who are not rude, and likewise, plenty of ADHD/ADD/Asperger applicants who are not rude that can be hired.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/site-information/no-fear-act/protections...

I notice how much of your post washes the managers hands clean of making these decisions. Not getting hired is the fault of disabled people who are behaving rudely by being incapable of certain things like eye contact. It's the fault of other employees who will quit. You know... that's almost the same rationale used to keep gay people out of the military. It's the COMPANY who wasn't convinced the employee was worth working with.

Have you ever had your job threatened because you didn't want to leave early, arrive late, take extra breaks, socialize instead of working, and wanted to work hard because you believed in the companies vision? Or because you didn't want to steal time? Because you wanted to learn your job? Oh man, it really made the other employees not like me. I was pulled aside and told what a bad culture-fit I was being. I was told my co-workers were going to tell my bosses I should be let go because they didn't like me. In the end I bent to the pressure and went half-way, messed up, and got singled out for punishment. At which point the culture I didn't fit changed for the better because everybody felt so damned guilty.

In my entire time in the workforce I have never seen "culture-fit" being anything other than vague opaque bullshit used to discriminate against the disadvantaged and hard-working.

"Culture" has been deemed the #1 important in hiring in the startup culture in the last 5 or probably 10 years. Even large old-school companies seem to go for this. The reality is this: just open Glassdoor, a newspaper or talk to people directly and there are always people who can tell you how bad a place is. And if it's not that, then people might be in complete denial, wondering why things don't work, why the company is not able to reach any business or technical goals.

The reality is that most workplaces are pretty bad places to be, that's probably also why so many found their own companies or just freelance. That said, places with strong cultures seem really attractive to new employees but the places with the weakest (=non-existing) cultures are usually those where employees get most opportunity to develop and stay the longest.

> ... that's probably also why so many found their own companies or just freelance.

Fair enough, if you're in a work environment where you feel this way, I suggest trying to find a better work environment, or doing like you said: start a company or freelance.

I personally know a lot of places where they have had almost no churn in 5-10 years, they're having a lot of success, and everyone is happy and mission driven. I'm totally willing to say they may be the exception, but don't write off the work environment as a whole. Or do and go find your own thing, but don't just be unhappy.