Are you a 'culture fit'? You might not want to be
You are reading Compiler, a software engineering newsletter by Triplebyte editor Daniel Bean that delivers regular reportings and rantings on the industry's top news, trends and interesting players.
Greetings! I hope you’re enjoying your weekend. We published a great article at Triplebyte this week about how software engineers should approach the nebulous “culture fit” part of interviews. For the piece, engineer and veteran engineer interviewer Joseph Pacheco explained that while it’s important for candidates to do their research to figure out what a company means by culture fit, it’s equally crucial to focus inward to calculate what a fit looks like for themselves.
A lot of engineers think of culture fit assessments as problems that need to be solved. Just tell the company whatever you have to, whether it’s stuff you believe or not, and you’ll pass and slide into a great job for yourself. But that’s the farthest thing from the truth. This is not because I naively think companies are particularly good at evaluating culture fit — they frequently aren’t — it’s just that this approach is especially common and usually leads to more problems than it solves...
Recent college grads often say they’re open to any company that will take them. Not only are they company agnostic, but they don’t even know what they want to focus on technically. While this may seem requirement-free, it isn’t. It’s probably a bad idea, for example, to work for a company that's hostile to learning and has unrealistic expectations of its junior engineers. You could end up back on the job market in a few months with the added problem of having to explain what happened.
Read the full article “Are You a Culture Fit? How to Find Out — and Then Prove It Authentically” here.
As an add to Pacheco’s piece, I tossed some questions to Brandon Sammut, Chief People & Culture Officer at LiveRamp, to find out a little more on how companies navigate culture tests with engineering recruiting. He said one big thing is that he doesn’t look for candidates who try to be culture fits, but “culture adds.” Here’s more of what he had to say (edited for brevity).
How does LiveRamp think of "culture fit" in the interview process?
An important distinction in how we thoughtfully hire across our organization is that we prefer to evaluate for “cultural add” versus “cultural fit.” … [Great candidates] bring something new or different to the table while also demonstrating a connection to your company values and excitement about your products and the problems they solve.
We incorporate “culture add” questions into initial and final steps of the interview process. We also utilize validated assessments that test the technical skills from a catalog of design and coding interviews, which enables hiring based on skills and technical ability.
We address groupthink bias by ensuring that interviewers cannot see one another’s interview scores and notes until after all scorecards are submitted. We also ensure that interviews are structured—all candidates are asked questions from our catalog of questions and evaluated against a consistent rubric.
Another key part of our interview process is making sure our panel of interviewers has diverse representation. And we recognize the longstanding system-level biases—whether related race, gender, age, and so on—that are ingrained into society and the workforce. These can get in the way of identifying and attracting brilliant people from all backgrounds. Some biases are so subtle that they can be hard to spot, hence our focus on system-level interventions in hiring and other talent practices.
And if you're able to say, how do you think LiveRamp's view of this differs or agrees with run-of-the-mill tech companies today?
While we can’t speak to how other companies approach hiring - whether for software engineers, or across other functions - our approach focuses on specific hiring systems and practices that enable candidates to put their best foot forward and come away with an authentic sense of who we are and the problems we solve with our technology.
We are committed to hiring strong engineering talent from underrepresented backgrounds. For example, we make a concerted effort to attract qualified candidates from traditionally underrepresented groups by focusing on recruiting events and technical community engagements that showcase our diversity and values. We also recognize the value of hiring people from outside of the tech industry, in part because of the fresh perspectives they bring to our team.
Keep in mind, evolving your company culture does not and should not stop at the recruitment level. It should be ingrained into the very fabric of the organization starting with attraction and recruitment, but also extending to onboarding, development, retention and even separation.
To that end, you also have to invest in “homegrown” talent - providing existing employees with personalized resources and guidance to help them reach their full potential, even (and especially) if their career path unfolds in non-traditional ways. We’ve seen a good deal of success with this. Look no further than our own Anneka Gupta, president and head of products and platforms at LiveRamp. Anneka started as an engineer and then took on roles in marketing, people and culture, and product, despite no prior experience. By being flexible and fluid in how we define a person’s “success” at LiveRamp, we are able to achieve a company culture that we feel is unlike anything else out there, while balancing the needs of current and prospective employees.
If a candidate strongly believes they are a good fit, what can they do to best show it?
Really, we just encourage candidates to be themselves and to let their personality be a complement to their professional skills and expertise. In parallel, we believe we have designed our interview process in such a way that we make it easier for potential new hires to demonstrate how best they could contribute or enhance our organization. Another area that is very important to us is innovation, so any projects or activities that show their innovative side would be a great selling point for our environment.
Engineering News and Talk
Machine learning is getting easier, but software engineering is still hard. Towards Data Science
RIP, apps? Google has teased the future of smartphone interfaces. Fast Company
Why developers who use Rust love it so much. Stack Overflow Blog
Survey says the hobby programmers spend most of their time away from work on is … programming! JetBrains Blog
Some educated guesses on software transitioning to MacOS on ARM. The Shape of Everything
From Triplebyte
Triplebyte has new “Entry-level” assessments and other features for programmers who are just starting out. Joining Triplebyte is a great way for engineers to showcase their skills and attract recruiters and hiring managers. (You already knew that.) But with the new Entry-level tracks on the platform, now engineers from all phases of their career can stand out. The recently launched Triplebyte Community is also a great forum for new engineers to engage and get help from their peers. Read more about all the new things Triplebyte is doing for early-career candidates here.
Tech companies are still interviewing engineers remotely. Triplebyte VP of Product Aaron Cannon recently started up a webinar interview series on this topic, particularly about technical hiring during the COVID pandemic. His next guest is Gem’s Head of People, Caroline Stevenson. You can register for the June 15 live Zoom here to catch their conversation.
Back with more Shark Tank data! In a follow-up to her last analysis of the reality TV pitch show, Triplebyte science writer Jen Ciarochi examined all the Shark Tank technology pitches from seasons nine through 11 to answer the following: What questions did sharks ask tech entrepreneurs? How were these questions answered? Were certain responses associated with success or failure? What are the various reasons sharks said, “I'm out”? Read it here.
Some companies hiring engineers on Triplebyte right now:
Check out Triplebyte’s Actively Hiring page to find more companies that are looking for software engineering talent right now!
Tech Update of the Week
Android Studio 4.1 (and an alpha version of 4.2) were released: Alongside the first Android 11 beta release this week, Google also rolled out new versions of the Android Studio development environment. A headlining feature in the 4.2 test version is wireless debugging over ADB, “a major time saver for developers (and that’s something developers have asked for for a very long time),” TechCrunch reports. The Android Emulator is now also built directly inside Android Studio in both versions, and Tensorflow Lite machine learning model imports are also supported.
Triplebyte helps engineers assess and showcase their technical skills and connects them with great opportunities. You can get started here.
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