
Cracking the Culture Interview - benshuyichen
https://heybenchen.com/cracking-the-culture-interview-1
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non-entity
I remember one time seeing a job posting at one of the big tech companies
everyone talks about that looked interesting to me. No way I'd be able to pass
the interview today, but out of curiosity I decided to look into what they
would be like. I found a copy of one of those popular "interview handbooks"
that go into how to get into such a company and it went on to describe how
they expect you to he incredibly enthusiastic about the company and its
products in a way that seemed very artificial to me. Not sure I could manage
to bullshit that well enough regardless of a technical interview.

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hevelvarik
Sorry this smells toxic to me. In my experience the overwhelming majority of
people I worked with contributed positively to the culture, most likely
because the hiring managers refrained from hiring shitty people, and most
people who aren’t shitty contribute positively to a team dynamic when the
duties align with their area of competence.

I’ll go out on a limb and assert that if your professional culture is such
that you need to focus long and hard to figure out who will and won’t fit in,
your culture is what is problematic.

~~~
benshuyichen
I agree that the vast majority of people are pleasant, positive, and good to
work with. I also think not hiring arrogant jerks should be table stakes for
any company.

However, if you're not trying to assess a person's soft skills, motivations,
and working style, you're leaving a huge part of the hiring decision up to
luck. At the end of the day you want to hire someone who is going to do a
great job at the company. There's more to that than passing a coding
interview.

Often times it's not even about being a "good" person or a "shitty" person.
All of that is relative to the role and environment.

For example, I've worked with some engineers who are excellent at their
specialization but have no interest in working on areas outside of their
domain. This might be a perfect fit for a large organization that is looking
for a domain expert but a potentially poor fit for a startup that needs
engineers who enjoy doing a bit of everything.

On the flip side, I've seen some engineers who have thrived at smaller
companies but then really struggle to navigate the politics necessary to have
impact at larger companies. Maybe they're even capable of learning this at
some point, but I wouldn't hire a senior engineer who isn't able to give me a
solid example of navigating some interpersonal disagreement.

You can't assess for this kind of alignment without digging into a person's
background and experiences.

I think inevitably if you're looking for a job you're going to have to talk
about some of these key stories at one point or another. I wrote this to help
people get the best shot at landing a job that's a good fit for them. Even if
you don't end up using these stories at all, I hope they may even be valuable
purely as a self-reflection exercise.

