
Inside the Mirrortocracy - ahupp
http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html
======
austinz
That linked 42Floors blog post is terribly self-unaware.

> Most startups take the building of their culture very seriously, especially
> when the culture is still new and quite fragile.

If your culture is so fucking fragile that a guy wearing a suit (as opposed to
a T-shirt and jeans) poses an existential threat to it, you need to re-
evaluate whether you are actually building a company 'culture', or just some
random agglomeration of the personality traits of the company's earliest
employees.

> My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of
> Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome.

If I were a founder and you were a candidate who tried to bribe me like this,
I'd politely show you the door. Why does the gift need to come before the
interview? If it's a token of appreciation, why not after the acceptance or
rejection? Are you hiring candidates based on their technical credentials, or
their hipster credentials?

~~~
lilsunnybee
> Sometimes we’ll have a thirty minute interview extend the rest of the day
> and into the evening. We don’t mandate it, and we don’t ding you if you have
> other plans. But when it works out organically, it’s a nice thing for
> everyone and it moves the process along much faster.

Yeah we're not going to penalize you if you don't have your schedule
completely open. Like if you have kids or commitments or something. It's cool!
But it's also sort of a strong signal that you're just not going to be a good
fit here.

> My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of
> Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome.

If you want to improve your chances of getting hired just bring some awesome
gifts along. Also it helps a lot if you're already a friend of someone here,
which totally isn't insularity it's just having a strong network and
connections.

~~~
scott_s
_Like if you have kids or commitments or something. It 's cool! But it's also
sort of a strong signal that you're just not going to be a good fit here._

You have entered exceedingly dangerous territory, and I don't think you
realize it. Morally and legally. What you're essentially saying is, "We want
people like us."

Honestly, I'm running into a bit of Poe's Law. I can't tell if what you wrote
is serious or satire.

~~~
scott_s
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am it was satire. So, good
work.

------
dkarapetyan
I have noticed this myself at a few places I have interviewed and after the
2nd or 3rd time you can kinda smell it. Most of the time the company is just a
bunch of 20-somethings running around with their heads on fire, working
ridiculous hours because they have no idea what their tech stack is supposed
to actually be, all the while getting paid almost nothing for wasting their
best years in a monoculture bubble.

Best thing you can do is just avoid those places like the plague. There are
places that are run by grown ups and I don't mean people older than
20-something but people that are mature enough to understand what diversity
and culture really mean. Places where there is a balance between work and
personal life and where people don't pretend to be in a frat house because it
is the only way they know how to handle themselves.

I think the only reason those cultures persist is because they are extremely
cheap to maintain from a capital perspective and you can have 10 of them
running in parallel to increase your odds of hitting a jackpot and getting
acquired by google or facebook and raking in some nice returns for your
investors which by the way are way older than 20-something. So if you look at
it from that perspective it is all about maximizing returns from an investor's
perspective and the rest of it is just-so story to keep the pipeline of 20
year olds churning. I think there are some nice parallels between virgins
waiting in heaven and million dollar acquisitions. The tactics being used to
exploit the minds of the impressionable are the same in both scenarios. The
insular cultures that result from those tactics is just a natural byproduct.

------
rayiner
> “Well, I grabbed coffee with the founder, and I had dinner with the team
> last night, and then _we went to a bar together.”_

I'm no teetotaler, but bars can be uncomfortable to downright hostile places
for the majority of people (women + people who don't drink for religious or
health reasons). It's absolutely inappropriate and unprofessional to
incorporate one into an interview. This is typical "old boy's club" shit, just
with hipster glasses and organic carrots.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
I do drink. A bit. Not much, though, and I'm not the bar type. For me, that
would likely kill the interview. Maybe that's for the best; maybe I wouldn't
fit with them, and that's a good filter. They're clearly looking for social as
well as technical fits, and I wouldn't be that.

~~~
smoyer
I feel the same way ... but I'd like to add that the main reason I hate bars
is that they're too loud to have an intelligent conversation (except when
they're almost empty). I have problems filtering background noise so it's even
tougher for me - to the point where I commonly read lips.

------
7Figures2Commas
> This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed.
> Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out
> how to get over itself and tap that pool wins...You want a juicy industry to
> disrupt? How about your own?

This is a great post, but I take issue with the author's conclusion.

The harsh reality is that most of these so-called Valley Culture startups
aren't actually competing in a "tech war." Most have relatively simple CRUD
apps with at best moderate usage. Founders delude themselves into believing
that they need far more engineering resources than they really do for obvious
reasons, and investors have plenty of reasons of their own for indulging and
rewarding these delusions.

The good news is that no disruption is needed. The majority of the Valley
Culture startups will die off in the next several years and at some point, the
economic and monetary policy environment will ensure that they're not replaced
with a new batch of Valley Culture startups.

In the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities (in the Bay Area and
elsewhere) for folks who don't want to deal with the nonsense.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Indeed. And this is a particular problem in tech and the valley especially. In
many other industries and other locations is perfectly acceptable to just run
a business. Make stuff that people want and get on with your lives. But in an
SV startup you exist in this bizarre world where if you're not changing the
world with engineers who are the best of the best of the best then you're
somehow fucking up. They don't actually hire the top 1% (or even 10%) of
engineers but they create an elaborate kabuki dance which gives them plausible
rationalizability that they do.

The downside is more than just passing up good engineers though. Lots and lots
of research has shown that more diverse teams come up with superior and more
robust solutions to problems. When everyone thinks the same way about a
problem they come up with the same solutions, but this just exacerbates the
problems of satisficing. When there's diversity and a true interchange of
ideas combined with robust intellectual skepticism and criticism innovation is
enhanced and it's easier to break out of the local minima trap.

------
pdkl95

       > It’s not that we’re so petty or strict about the dress code
       > that we are going to disqualify him for not following an
       > unwritten rule, but we know empirically that people who come
       > in dressed in suits rarely work out well for our team.
    

I suggest comparing this...umm... _shallow_ attitude with this example from a
very different end of the economic spectrum (which was a link I found here on
HN late last year):

    
    
        http://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/
    

Type of job and income level seem to independent of the problem of
_gatekeepers_ (petty exercising of local power, often over superficial traits
such as the current popular trends in apparel).

~~~
gretful
It's funny, really. Even poor white men are treated this way. People judge by
appearances. People want to be around people that are like them. They want a
'tribe', not diversity. It's human nature.

------
jasallen
This post is brilliant and correct. The best part is where he closes with the
acknowledgement that the system works... to a limited degree. He's not _just
slamming it_. It is actually an ok way to minimize risk at the cost of upside
in the short term.

But it is unscalable for a couple key reasons. (1) Lack of diversity is lack
of ideas and experiences, you may fail to find the "next big thing" simply
because your echo chamber doesn't include that experience. (2) raw scale.
There are only so many Stanford grads et al out there. When you need your
25th, 100th or 150th technical person you will need to have achieved either
Google's cachet or start expending your parameters quite a lot.

 _Finding_ people's value is a very important management skill that seems to
have been eschewed in this "cultural fit" culture. It's true there are _some_
people that will be poison, but if the majority of people with the right
skills are _bad_ for your organization rather than the majority being able to
be a positive, you should ask yourself if your organization is adequately
healthy and robust, or is it an infant in an incubator, only surviving as long
as you obsessively manage every input.

------
pron
> Without a natural feedback loop, interviewing mostly runs on myth and
> survivor bias.

It is a law of human nature that a chaotic environment breeds magical thinking
and ingroup allegiance, and there are few business environments more chaotic
than Silicon Valley, where startups succeed or fail seemingly at random. The
noise calls for reason, and because there are no true known causes for success
our mind demands some explanation. How many times have we read the line --
often written by some very smart people -- "correlation isn't causation, _but
we 've found a strong correlation between_....". What follows the _but_ in
that sentence is what is known as superstition. Correlation doesn't equal
causation, but no buts follow. Actually, correlation plus confirmation bias
equals magical thinking, and "data driven" correlation (with no confirmation
bias) equals bigotry. Failing to realize that correlation without causation
provides us with exactly zero predictive abilities (it might be "predictive"
on unknown present data, but not on future data) is the root of a lot of evil.
In fact, "data driven" correlation -- because it disguises itself as knowledge
-- creates (or, usually, reinforces) a reverse causation.

> Whatever else one can say about the Mirrortocracy, it has the virtue of
> actually working, in the sense that the lucky few who break in have a decent
> rate of success.

This is the worst of all fallacies belying the "SV logic". Even supposing it
were true, a large-number statistical observation says little or nothing about
the behavior of a single random variable, or a single startup in this
instance. Yes, the startup system "works" (for whom is another question) on
the whole, but the vast majority of individual startups still fail. Learning
back from correlative observations on the large system and implying the so
called lessons to an individual company has little grounds in any rigorous
reasoning.

> You can protest your logic and impartiality all day long, but the only
> honest statement is that we're all biased.

Understanding this is one of the keys to progress. How many times have we seen
posts discussing sexism in tech deemed "controversial" here on HN? But the
truth is that the chance a member of a society imbued with biases for
millennia is _not_ sexist (or otherwise biased) is extremely slim. The only
way to fight this bias is to seek it out and _see_ it (because it's there).

~~~
sharpneli
"Correlation doesn't equal causation" I've noticed that people tend to
misinterpret this sentence. In a lot of discussions it shows that people think
that there can be correlation while the things don't have _ANY_ relationship
between eachother, as in the correlation would arise purely trough random
chance.

That is blatantly false. Correlation implies at very minimum a causal link
trough a third effect. The traditional example of drownings and ice cream
consumption has that third link. Nice summer days. So those two are linked.

I think one should say "Correlation doesn't imply direct causation". That's
closer to the truth.

~~~
dragonwriter
> That is blatantly false. Correlation implies at very minimum a causal link
> trough a third effect.

No, it doesn't.

Correlation can be coincidence; while a particular correlation may be unlikely
on its own to be coincidence, there are _lots of combinations_ of things in
the universe that might be compared side-by-side, and so unlikely coincidental
correlations are everywhere, and so if you troll through the universe looking
for correlations, you are going to find a bunch that don't mean anything
causally.

~~~
sharpneli
Sure. But with enough datapoints the probability of the correlation being a
mere accident is going to be vanishingly small.

And by enough I am talking about hundreds and more of datapoints. If one looks
at things like yearly values of something for within last 10 years like the
page spurious correlations is doing one is bound to find some weird ones.

~~~
supine
Pointing out weird correlations that have absolutely no causal link whatsoever
is a global sport.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=weird+correlations](https://www.google.com/search?q=weird+correlations)

The first result is a beauty [http://twentytwowords.com/funny-graphs-show-
correlation-betw...](http://twentytwowords.com/funny-graphs-show-correlation-
between-completely-unrelated-stats-9-pictures/)

------
lsh123
I am managing software development teams in small startups and big companies
in the Valley for more than 10 years now. I've probably had several hundreds
of interviews, looked at thousands of resumes and hired a couple hundred
people directly. One of the things I always look for during the interview is
how the candidate is different from me. I obviously don't want to have weird
folks who behave outside of the social norm in my team. But I absolutely love
employees with different than my experience, education, background, and
especially I love people who disagree with me. The team members who can argue
with me are my best employees. These are the people I will be chatting to
bounce ideas. These are the people I will be working hard to convince that my
proposal is the right one. And these are the people whom I will go to when I
need an advice (simply because they might see the problem from a different
angle than I do).

"The Company Culture" is important. But you do not create it by writing blog
posts or even by having company off-sites every month. I create the culture in
my team by re-enforcing my values every day during meetings or simple chats at
the water cooler. Most software developers are smart and can easily see
through the BS of startup or large company "culture building exercises" when
the day-to-day processes in the company go in a completely opposite direction.

------
fnordsensei
Yet another absurdity from Monty Python has turned into reality.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo)

~~~
danielweber
The end of that video is the perfect accompaniment to the 42floors blog.

"He showed up in a suit, so he wasn't going to be hired, and we didn't tell
him for the whole night! HA HA HA HA!!"

------
qwerta
I would not call it *tocracy but business model. Company can pay under-market
salary, if it inflates ego of its employees and make them feel special. It
already works in science, fashion, medicine...

------
JVIDEL
I think the article makes a mistake with its use of the word "diversity" here
since these days the common use its ingrained more as a matter of race/gender
and not so much opinions, and really you can find plenty of groups with _that_
idea of diversity where everyone thinks the same and there's no debate
whatsoever.

The word OP is looking for is groupthink, and the problem he's describing
starts with deindividuation, the process when the group cohesiveness takes
priority over individual freedom of expression.

And well the problem with this "mirrortocracy" (which is just a new word to
describe _Nepotism_ ) is the typical conundrum of " I want either less
corruption or more opportunity to participate in it", basically the problem
wont be solved until the number of people trying to enter the inner circle
becomes smaller than the number of people trying to tear it down. But the
reward for those who _do_ make it is so high most individuals would rather
live in what's essentially a tragedy of the commons than a place where there
is more equality at the expense of a much lower chance of "making it big".

------
smoyer
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people
are just smarter.” — Mark Zuckerberg

I always chuckle to myself when I read this because I realize that one day
Zuck's going to say "Hey, I'm older" and by extension he'll have to also say
"Ouch, I'm dumber". I suspect he'll recant the statement due to "youthful
arrogance" at some point!

~~~
epochwolf
There's a half truth there, a lot of young people think they are a lot smarter
than they really are. They have false confidence that goes with not knowing
what they don't know.

~~~
smoyer
Agreed ... my own parents were pretty dumb until I moved out of the house, got
a job, rented a house and had to completely support myself. Getting married
and having kids added more responsibility (and made my parents seem even
smarter).

------
jmromer
> Well, dude, no, actually you can overdress for an interview and you just
> did.

I can think of two reasons why someone would dress up for a dressed-down
interview:

(1) They don't yet understand the social terrain they've entered well enough
(particularly salient: people with class/cultural backgrounds underrepresented
in tech).

(2) They're conscientious enough to go through the trouble of dressing well
for an interview in order to signal they care about getting hired.

So that's some of what you're selecting against when you reject a candidate
for failing the "go-out-for-a-beer" test: irrelevant cultural differences and
conscientiousness. Bizarre.

------
vfxGer
What I find infuriating is how all these companies think they are so unique
with their interviewing process then ask the same inane questions. This is
worse when the same questions are asked by different people at the same
company.

College qualifications or any real qualifications are being dismissed by more
and more people but the vacuum that has been left is being filled with crap
like 15+ rounds of interviews and/or 12 hour interviews.

The hiring process is currently broken. I think the only fix is to have
proper, trusted qualifications (again?).

~~~
Taek
Qualifications are hard. I just graduated, and now that I'm a CEO I can tell
you there's no way I'd hire someone just because they have my degree. At RPI
(my school), there are at least as many completely worthless developers as
there are diamonds, and they all have one degree.

I don't trust qualifications alone.

~~~
vfxGer
I agree, I wouldn't hire anyone just because they have my degree either BUT we
need some qualifications to fill this gap otherwise the interview process will
get more and more unwieldy.

------
CmonDev
"It's hard to find good people to hire"

Oh, come on! Where is this myth coming from? I don't know about USA, but here
in London there is an over-abundance of IT workforce (what else would justify
the sub £60k senior dev job offers).

~~~
KaiserPro
Yeah but none of them are 25, thin, tall, tattooed and have boyish mustachios.

don't be hatin' bro, or what ever the vernacular is.

~~~
facepalm
Heh you are not supposed to judge people based on such superficial traits.
Programming skill is all that counts (according to the people who dissed me in
this thread anyway).

------
clavalle
>The problem is that all cliques are self-reinforcing. There is no way to re-
calibrate once the insiders have convinced themselves of their greatness.

Sure there is; don't join the clique. There is no law, private or otherwise,
that says you can't play your own game and win.

Despite the hype, the Valley isn't the only game in town even today.

They can self-reinforce all they want but if they start losing because of
outside forces then they will have to reexamine their assumptions or fail.

------
chillingeffect
FWIW, hiring/interviews aren't just problems in SV culture. They're
problematic all across the industries I've worked in.

This article is simply pointing out how the lack of established practices
manifests itself within SV culture.

You could write a similarly outrageous article about how the people at one of
my former employers knew next-to-nothing about interviewing people and how
that resulted in a pileup of even more people who knew even less :)

------
earljwagner
I think this is more about California culture than the Bay Area specifically.
Are L.A. Or San Diego really that much different?

------
cafard
The thing that strikes me is that this isn't new. There is a famous story of
Steve Jobs and his group abusing some guy who had shown up to an interview in
a suit. DeMarco and Lister in _Peopleware_ can be read as justifying aspects
of this (see chapter 22).

------
eli_gottlieb
> "The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is
> completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as non-diverse as
> possible."

Why the bloody hell would you _optimize_ for uniformity?

------
kfcm
This problem isn't endemic to Silicon Valley (and SFO). It's spread to almost
any given company in any given location in the US.

------
inventor
If like Rome, Silicon Valley should ever lose it's eminence, the blog post
from 42Floors is a classic piece of evidence as to why it happened.

------
x0x0
Carlos sounds like a wanker who spends too much time reading trust fund
assholes on gawker bitch (and lie! Hi Sam) about startups.

 _Way_ over here in reality: I've worked for 6 startups, some you've heard of,
and some you haven't. At the smallest I was employee 6; at the largest ~60.
Now, I'm not claiming I've never seen unprofessional behavior, but

1 - the interview process has been pretty obvious. Yes, I've grabbed dinner
with founders at one company. What the hell do you think eating dinner with
two people you just met to discuss their company is, exactly?

2 - In 6 startups, I've never gone drinking with the team before starting, nor
do I know of anyone who has. None of my friends from those startups who are on
im right now has either.

3 - At one startup, some engineers went to strip clubs. Not my thing. No known
ill effects.

4 - I don't go drinking with coworkers except maybe once every three months.
And drinking means 1-2 beers then out; it's been probably 3 years since I
spent a whole night drinking with coworkers. No known ill effects.

5 - perhaps some people should leave sf and see the peninsula and valley.
There's a whole world of startups here that have 30+ year old employees, some
with kids. At many of these adult companies it's fine to come in around 9,
bust ass, and walk out the door at 5:30. If you don't fuck around with
pingpong and scooters all goddamn day, you'll find you don't have to spend 12
hours in the office to get your job done. Me personally: no fucking scooters,
no ping pong. No known ill effects.

6 - I do wonder if Carlos would complain similarly if an employee came to an
interview severely underdressed and the company held it against him or her.
Probably not. So learning not to wear a 3-piece suit to a startup interview is
just part of the gig. Do, oh, 60 minutes of reading on the internet and you'll
probably be fine. Hell, email your damn recruiter and _ask_. He or she really
wants you to get that job.

7 - For ultra-small startups, recruiting from social circles is just part of
the deal. I imagine very few tiny companies really hire randoms off the
internet, or whatever people did before craigslist and dice.

8 - whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss
indian males? Has he ever _seen_ the valley?

9 - on a serious note, it's really weird how startup demographics mirror cs
degree demographics.

10 - and while I do strongly believe we should make the industry more
inclusive -- holding tiny startups responsible for not creating a recruiting
pipeline back to high school is ridiculous. I'm not sure where social
responsibilities kick in; it's some gradient between the 1 person company and
the $10B corp. But the small startups don't have the resources to do much
about it.

~~~
dagw
_Whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss
indian males? Has he ever seen the valley?_

Uh? On the maps I have India is in Asia.

~~~
x0x0
are you from the UK? In the US, colloquially, asian == japan, korea, china,
vietnam, cambodia, laos and indian = people from india. Or perhaps you would
call them south-east asian? But you would never call a person from india as
asian.

~~~
taejo
South-East Asia generally refers to Vietnam, Thailand, etc. Sri Lanka, India,
Bangladesh, etc. are South Asia.

~~~
x0x0
sorry, right, south-asian. I'm tired. And also american, and therefore know
nothing about geography =P

------
invalidOrTaken
I agreed with the sentiment of this article, until I thought about it.

No one owes you a job. If you think companies are missing out on your amazing
talent, start your own and prove them wrong. This is a million times easier to
do with software than with a white-shoe Wall Street firm.

~~~
jdbernard
I don't think the author is looking at it from the point of view of a
disgruntled interviewee, rather from the point of view of the company.

    
    
        This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins.
    

He's not the guy looking for a job, he's the guy hiring, looking at all of his
peers and scratching his head over their insular hiring practices.

------
facepalm
So what is a good/correct hiring criterion? I was under the impression that
nobody really knows.

And I am not convinced that it is a bad idea to look for "cultural fit". For
example I don't dismiss anybody as a programmer who has never heard about Paul
Graham or Joel Spolsky, but certainly consider it weird and it's probably at
least a minus in my book.

~~~
VexXtreme
> So what is a good/correct hiring criterion? I was under the impression that
> nobody really knows.

Actually I can't believe you can say this with a straight face. It is well
known what a good hiring criterion is (e.g. productive, smart, not an asshole,
can work with different people etc). All these things can be sussed out during
the interview process quite professionally without resorting to questioning
people's musical tastes and what they do in their free time.

> And I am not convinced that it is a bad idea to look for "cultural fit".

You just might be young and inexperienced but it is also possible you are
socially inept and can't get along with professionals whose character and
background don't match yours - and don't get me wrong - this is just the read
I'm getting from your posts, it's not meant to be an insult.

If anything terrifies me in this world it's intolerant, prejudiced, xenophobic
people who can't get along with anyone who is not exactly like them.
Absolutely detestable stuff.

And I for one don't really care about having dinners with my coworkers, going
clubbing together and similar nonsense. You're paying me to do a job for you
and I will deliver my end of the deal. Beyond that I owe you nothing,
especially not things like entertaining you and inflating your ego in your
free time.

~~~
facepalm
"productive, smart, not an asshole, can work with different people etc"

People seem to struggle to determine those things during an interview, though.
If you don't understand me, I can only diagnose a lack of curiosity on your
part. Otherwise you would have read some of the countless articles on hiring
issues by now.

" people who can't get along with anyone who is not exactly like them"

I never said anything like that. I just think it is a good idea to judge
people by what you know. What else can you do? It's completely random to hire
somebody you don't understand or where you don't know where they are coming
from.

"And I for one don't really care about having dinners with my coworkers, going
clubbing together and similar nonsense. You're paying me to do a job for you
and I will deliver my end of the deal."

It's nice that you don't care about your coworkers as people (having dinner
with them or becoming friends). I am sure there are loads of companies that
are perfect for you, because they only require blue collar programming drones.

But why should what you prefer be good for every company? Why shouldn't a
company be allowed to aim for co-workers who become friends? Why not let the
market sort it out (maybe the drone companies will outperform the friend
companies, maybe not).

~~~
VexXtreme
> It's nice that you don't care about your coworkers as people (having dinner
> with them or becoming friends). I am sure there are loads of companies that
> are perfect for you, because they only require blue collar programming
> drones.

First of all, I care about my coworkers to the extent it is necessary to work
together. Also, if they ever run into hardships, I am willing to help out if I
can. It's just basic human decency that I will afford to anyone in my life,
not just coworkers. But at the end of the day, I am primarily seeking a
mutually profitable business relationship, not an emotional relationship.

Second of all, I don't have the need to become friends with my coworkers. If
it happens spontaneously then fine. Work is a good place as any to make
friends. If it doesn't happen, I'm really not going to lose my sleep over it.
I don't have an obsessive need to be friends with my coworkers.

Also, I think you'll be surprised when I tell you I actually work for a
company building cutting edge stuff. The fact that you assume that you need to
work at a particular kind of startup with a particular culture to have that
just shows how prejudiced you are. There are plenty of amazing and rewarding
jobs that don't require these things.

> But why should what you prefer be good for every company? Why shouldn't a
> company be allowed to aim for co-workers who become friends? Why not let the
> market sort it out (maybe the drone companies will outperform the friend
> companies, maybe not).

Fair enough. I respect your opinion. However, if you're going to screen people
based on arbitrary criteria, why don't you go ahead and put those criteria in
the job ad? What's preventing you from making the process transparent by
writing say, "Only people who are like us and seek to become friends need
apply"? Or perhaps "Only people who listen to Michael Bolton and like drinking
beer on Fridays...". That would be perfect because people who are not
interested in those aspects could just skip your job ad and move on without
having their precious time wasted jumping through hoops in a lopsided game
with oblique rules. Don't you think that simply listing technical requirements
in the ad and then turning tables on people and changing the rules of the game
once they're sitting in the room with you is unfair and disrespectful? Are you
afraid that listing those criteria would make your company look ridiculous?

~~~
facepalm
I would assume "liking each other" is usually a given job requirement. Also
putting too many criteria into a job ad increases the risk for discrimination
lawsuits, so it's probably better to just be generic.

Also, saying such things beforehand would make them too easy to fake.

I am btw not advocating to hire based on musical taste. I only mentioned it
because it seems to be something people often talk about when they get to know
each other, and because it might indicate likelihood to get along.

"The fact that you assume that you need to work at a particular kind of
startup with a particular culture to have that just shows how prejudiced you
are."

Where did you get any of that? I never mentioned startups, nor did I say one
culture is better than another. I just think people should be free to choose.

~~~
jdbernard
> I would assume "liking each other" is usually a given job requirement.

Not really. I've had plenty of co-workers over the years I did not
particularly like, but with whom I've had very productive working
relationships. I'm not saying I actively disliked them, but they are not the
type of people I would have become friends with in other situations.

There was the guy who was super into his micro-brewery, had to make sure
everyone knew about it, and had a critical opinion of every restaurant in the
county. Super annoying, great programmer, we worked really well together. One
of my favorite co-workers.

There was the lady who went on and on about her pugs. She always smelled like
she'd just expressed their anal glands. Very self-absorbed as well. You could
depend on her to take care of any issue that came to her desk in a timely
fashion, with excruciating attention to detail.

There was also the one office assistant who was the nicest, friendliest person
on the floor. She never got anything done. You either had to nag her about
something, work around her, or just do it yourself.

Of course, often times when you take the time to get to know someone you find
that your initial impression was wrong or shallow, and you end up really
liking them. However, your "culture fit" portion of the process never gets
beyond that shallow impression. Learning to get along with people you don't
"like" is one of the hallmarks of maturity.

~~~
facepalm
But did you make the hiring decision for those people?

~~~
jdbernard
Not for one of the three I chose as examples, but yes for others.

One guy was very awkward socially, over confident in himself and under-
appreciative of everyone else. At least that is how he appeared in the
interview. My team at the time rotated three people through as a hiring board
to spread out the work of finding people and I was on the board that
interviewed him. He was a very weird guy, and I mean more than your typical
loner/introvert with underdeveloped social skills. We were a little worried
about his ability to work well with the team, but on technical merits he was
fantastic. He also didn't show any red flags, just general weirdness. So we
hired him, and he was a good fit. Definitely in the top half of our team as
far as quality and timeliness of his output.

I'm also glad that the people managing the hiring process for the other two
employees I mentioned was willing to look at their professional record and not
at their "culture fit" because pug-lady and microbrewery-guy were some of our
best people. When I left the company where I worked with microbrewery guy, he
was the one to whom I handed all of my outstanding projects.

