[tsmith]

Hiring for cultural fit is just laziness, and interviewers should stop using it as a "metric".

Assessing for ability is extremely difficult - in the case of programming positions, technical interview processes either suffer from a large number of false negatives (e.g. the "Google filter") or a large number of false positives (e.g. "this person doesn't know how to write a for loop; how did they get hired?").

Per the article, most interviewers interpret "cultural fit" as "personal fit" - how well do you like the interviewee? The example heuristics (going out for a beer with the candidate, spending a snowy night in an airport together, etc) have very little to do with company culture and very much to do with answering the question: "Do I like this person?".

Any 4 year old can tell when they like somebody. It's one of the easiest things in the world for a human being to assess.

Technical ability, on the other hand, is one of the hardest things in the world for human beings to asses, at least in the context of an interview. Assessing for "cultural fit" - which on the face of it makes perfect sense as a hiring metric - devolves into a way to avoid doing something difficult (assess technical ability) by doing something easy (assess personal affinity).