[matwood]

> I began to suspect it was because of "culture fit" -- will this 35 year old introvert fit in at our frat house/office?

The job does not have to be a frat house office in order for a candidate to fail the culture fit. Unfortunately many programmers think programming is 100% writing code, when often times it is more about communication and relationships. If you were missing a certain technical skill what would you do? Now apply that same mindset to being a little less socially awkward. No one is saying you have to learn to be Dale Carnegie himself, but even just a small amount of people skills goes a long way.

[electrograv]

But let’s imagine for the moment a candidate was actually rejected for being “too introverted”, as an example for the sake of this argument. Disclaimer: I’ve not seen anyone rejected for this reason explicitly, but I have heard an instance of a self-identifying extrovert reporting “organizational culture problems” to upper management which when asked for details became “while there was no bad or unwelcoming behavior of any kind (not even indirectly), the majority of engineers are too introverted and that makes me uncomfortable”.

In such a case, how is “too introverted” as a reason for rejection or even as a negative cultural connotation not overt discrimination to exclude neurodiversity?

I’d even be willing to concede that such personality-based discrimination may need to be made for customer-facing roles or roles if being charming or extroverted is explicitly part of the job description. But other than that, it seems odd to reject an engineering candidate for reasons like this.