Cracking the Culture Interview
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Cracking the Culture Interview
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Re: Cracking the Culture Interview
#2Sorry 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.
Re: Cracking the Culture Interview
#3Sorry 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…
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.
Re: Cracking the Culture Interview
#4I 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.