What Companies Mean by Culture Fit

I just thought of it this way: You're implementing "n P n" which just reduces to n factorial. So you just have to show that your 1st iteration is choosing from n items, your 2nd iteration is choosing from (n - 1) items, ... the (n - 1)th iteration is choosing from 2 items. (Choosing from 1 item is a noop, of course.)

All we have to do now to see that Fisher-Yates is fair is show that each shuffle can be produced by it. Given a desired shuffle, it is easy to construct the trace that results in it, and we are done.

You mean: Given a desired shuffle, you show you can construct the only trace that results in it.

You’re shocked but have no insight that you might be contributing to the problem.

I think that hiring for culture fit is not the hardest thing to do - it's no different from hiring for technical skills. It just requires that you have some background in psychology so that you can easily spot someone who is lying. Of course, it doesn't mean that you need to have a master degree in psychology. You can learn, and here experience and gut feelings play a very important role, although as someone has said, there are interesting questions you can ask to tell the Rockstar from the team player. So yes, you can use normal questions plus gut feelings.

For me more important than hiring the right people is how to retain the good ones and prevent assholes to prevail and destroy the nice atmosphere at work.

Prevention is nothing if you don't act when the problem occurs. And eventually it will.

I can't believe that companies like Amazon or Google with > 100000 employees only hire great people culturally fit. We are animals, and when put together there is always someone that wants to prevail. And there is always the culturally unfit that somehow sneaks in. The difference is how you tackle that. I have seen and been in companies where the action was literally doing nothing. You have to change to behave in a different way towards the asshole, in order to make your life easier. That's the answer. Lots of "Let's hire for good fit", but no "how to deal with aholes at work that disrupt your work environment".

Ps. People should read the "no as*hole rule" book. A first good resource on how to deal with such people.

Legally speaking, wouldn't the guy with allergy be federally protected class here? He has medical reason not directly related to work for why the office is not suitable for him. It seems to fall into legal definition.

Also, dog lovers I know in real life are not assholes to people with allergies or fears. My experience is that most accept allergies as real medical issues and would seek solution.

I also think that you are using the word asshole to liberally as in meaning "anyone who annoyed me mildly". That is not how "asshole" or "asshole culture" terms are normally used. Why being unpleasant is part of being asshole typically, it is not the whole thing. Typically, there are very real negative externalities on top of just being unpleasant (for example other people wasting time dealing with asshole temper tamptrums, people no voicing objections due to them or having to tip toe around him or spending a lot of effort to work around that person peculiarities etc).

Maybe if you work in the Land of the Free™ and live in constant fear of getting fired for some inconsequential reason, you have to have to abase yourself daily to your manager and act like a wage slave supplicant. Is that a life anyone can really be satisfied with, deliberately allowing oneself to be downtrodden for the sake of a few shekels?

Do you have a job where you simply do as you are told, like a private being shouted at by a drill sergeant, or do you have a career where your expertise and contributions have some significant value?

Work is full of compromises. No matter how hard you try, at some point you're going to end up giving advice or information to people which runs counter to what they would have preferred to hear. "No" is rather absolute. What would be more typical is suggesting that a course of action might be unwise, and suggesting possible alternatives along with the tradeoffs for each approach, i.e. criticise but in a constructive way. And let others decide which pros and cons are most important. You bring specific expertise and insight, and provide that to the group and decision makers, along with qualified recommendations, maybe very strong recommendations if the situation warranted it. Your recommendations and advice might well be ignored, but it's still important to make them in the first place so that they are at least known and considered.

You don't just live your life to satisfy your boss. You also have to live with yourself. Sometimes, for example, companies make very short-term decisions at the expense of their own longer-term viability and at the expense of their existing customers. Who internally acts as the voice of those customers and the future company if not you? If you didn't at least raise questionable design tradeoffs so that the consequences were well understood and informed decisions could be made, you are doing your employer a disservice (in my opinion). It doesn't matter what the ultimate decision is, but that you act professionally and provide all the necessary information for others to work with. If you get fired for trying to do your best for the company, you're well out of a bad company.