[SketchySeaBeast]

But how do you put team fit into a rubric. It's absolutely an element - a team of 1Xers will be more productive than a team or 10Xers who all can't stand each other. I wouldn't want to be part of a team where everyone has an excellent objective mark, but is just a bunch of jerks. What part of the objective rubric accounts for "can't play well with others"?

[maxaf]

One way is to define a set of bullet points that are representative of the team’s culture. This isn’t always easy, but is a worthwhile exercise even outside the context of hiring. Think: a localized version of the Joel Test. These values can be objective (“we strive for 100% test coverage”) and subjective (“we value communication over process”). Every candidate can be ranked relative to these values. The most important factor here is to rank every single candidate against every single value. This will most likely lead to additional questions for some candidates, such as, “tell us about a time when you found communication or process more helpful than the other, and how it made you feel”.

[braythwayt]

It's easy to frame "team fit" as "a team of 1Xers will be more productive than a team or 10Xers who all can't stand each other," but I am going to put Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" album on and say "citation needed."

Also, "team fit" is very nice when used in good faith, but all-too-often, hiring for "culture fit" or "team fit" ends up being a euphemism for "valuing a monoculture over valuing competence."

Here's HN discussing this exact subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3868873

[SketchySeaBeast]

I may have exaggerated with the values, but if we can't both agree that people who work well with each other are more productive than those who don't, I don't know what to tell you.

While it may be used poorly, it does still have value, and that's why it exists at all. If judging someone's personality and attitude wasn't important, there'd be no need for in-person interviews at all.

[braythwayt]

Well, you've already reframed the point you're trying to make. You just said "people who work well with each other are more productive than those who don't," but that's tautological, the very definition of "people who work well together" is that they are productive, and the definition of "don;t work well together" is that they aren't.

Whereas, in the comment I was responding to, you talked about "people who can't stand each other." You haven't made the case that if people can't stand each other, then they necessarily can't work productively together.

Furthermore, you seem to imply that if you can learn something about someone's personality and attitude, then you can judge whether they will be productive working with other people.

That's a perilous endeavour. It may seem intuitively obvious, but it isn't by a long shot. There are lots and lots and lots of examples of people who don't like each other or enjoy socializing or joking with each other who nevertheless get things done working together.

Furthermore, when people set out to build a framework around interviewing someone, or asking them a bunch of questions and from there working out their "compatibility" with other people, we always end up with something like Myers-Briggs.

Thaat kind of thing has been conclusively debunked as a signal for hiring or not hiring people. But most people aren't even as quasi-objective as Myers-Briggs. Most people just go with their intuition, which they couch as "experience."

When you ask such people, they tell you they are very good at hiring people. But of course, they don't really know that in an empirical sense. They don't measure their false negatives, they have no idea how many people they disliked turned out to be productive workers.

They don't work from a reproducible framework. In the end, they're just working their own biases and crediting their expertise for all the successful hires while downplaying unsuccessful hires, and ignoring outright no-hires who turned out to be successful elsewhere.

At the end of the day, you're running a business or a movement or whatever, and people have to put aside their likes and dislikes and execute on the mission. Most people can do that just fine. There are some exceptions, people who are toxic, but honestly those are the exceptions.

I find, with my n=1 sample set, that when you hire for competence, and hire people who have demonstrated competence in the past, they almost always get along well enough to do their jobs.

And when they don't, there's a little thing called management that you use to get people back on track. In my n=1 experience, people who have competence out the yin-yang but are so toxic that they cannot be managed and must be fired are rare, and easy enough to detect in the normal course of interviewing that there ois no need to constantly ask myself if the person I'm interviewing can get along with the team.

If they can make it through the interview process without insulting everyone or having a temper tantrum, and if they demonstrate competency programming, designing, and communicating their technical rationale, my experience is that they're nearly always going to get along well enough to G$D.

[rumanator]

> the very definition of "people who work well together" is that they are productive, and the definition of "don;t work well together" is that they aren't.

I don't agree.

Working well together suggests they cooperate to reach a common goal, regardless of their individual productivity.

Not working well together suggests that they might even waste their time attacking each other instead of working towards a common goal, which has a negative impact on a project regardless of how productive each individual might be.