Item — HN Reader

> companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit.

You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit".

> Sure, we probably miss some good people, but we have a specific culture in place that we all enjoy, and I don't want to feel uncomfortable or have to walk on egg shells around my team.

So you'd reject a candidate because of comfort and enjoyment? Even though the candidate could make you tons of money? That's very discouraging.

> You may just be rude in an interview, and that will 100% result in me turning you down. It doesn't matter much to me if you're an "Aspie/ADD"

There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. A person with Asperger's communicates differently than a person without Asperger's. You chose to interpret that difference as rudeness. Instead of understanding the cause of the differences and adapting to it, you simply eliminated the candidate for the sake of your own comfort.

This doesn't matter to you but it should. Especially if you want to claim you don't discriminate based on factors the candidate can't change.

2 comments

> You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit".

Do/would you hire any person who can answer your questions? There are plenty of smart people who are entirely unenjoyable people. Not liking someone is not discrimination.

> So you'd reject a candidate because of comfort and enjoyment? Even though the candidate could make you tons of money? That's very discouraging.

You seem to be implying that someone who is smart can obviously outperform people who are less smart. A good team is more than smart people, and a successful company is more than smart people. There is a big difference in the effectiveness of teams that are happy versus miserable. If a brilliant individual makes the rest of your team miserable, that's an awful tradeoff. If you think it's okay to do that, that's very discouraging.

> There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. A person with Asperger's communicates differently than a person without Asperger's. You chose to interpret that difference as rudeness. Instead of understanding the cause of the differences and adapting to it, you simply eliminated the candidate for the sake of your own comfort.

So instead of feeling insulted or threatened due to rude behavior, you should ignore it because it's your fault? If a guy is aggressively hitting on a girl, is it her fault? Should she change her behavior? Of course not. If you behave in a way that diminishes a collaborative work environment, why would the work environment be responsible for just putting up with the way you behave? You don't have to be the life of the party, but you have to at least act professional. If you can't pull that off for a single interview, you probably can't pull it off indefinitely in a professional environment.

This does matter to me, but the reality is that not everyone is a good fit for every setting. The whole point of interviewing is to find people who are going to help you move forward in the best way possible, and if you come into an interview and upset everyone you talk to, there are no data points to indicate that you being a smart asshole is going to help us move forward.

>Not liking someone is not discrimination.

I've heard the same by some individuals who say they don't like people of color. Perhaps your line of reasoning is not complete.

> There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole.

Someone may be rude because they're aspie or because they're assholes, but the end result is the same: dealing with rudeness. I rather not.

That's distressingly close to rejecting people because they sound rude for speaking AAVE instead of Received Pronunciation.

Or assuming that people from $COUNTRY are bad people when they merely communicate differently.