I am not the parent poster, but if we change the definition of "cultural fit," I would like to know if that changes your opinion. (Note that I am not cis-het.)
My definition of culture talks about the working values and processes in a company. Some engineers want to be given full problems and be left alone to solve them. Some engineers want to be given specifications on what to build and just turn to code.
Some engineers don't work well in an org without robust automated tests. Others are fine to leave it to QA and toss it over. Some really love agile environments, and some hate them. Some like large organizations where you can be a deep expert in a small piece, and some prefer to be a generalist getting software off the ground.
People have different preferences regarding async communications versus meetings. And even more fundamentally, some people want to go home at the end of the day and forget about work while others want to feel like they're in something so important that they can obsess over. (Most of us are a bit in the middle, but both extremes there exist.)
Culture fit isn't (or shouldn't be) if people like to go drinking at the end of the shift, or if they like to talk about sci-fi or if you fit into the top end of the kyriarchy. (And if that is part of a company's cultural fit, it's going to be toxic in other ways, but as you say, widely marginalized groups and cultures are going to be affected much more here.)
> My definition of culture talks about the working values and processes in a company.
Yeah, that does change it. And while that's certainly a reasonable definition of "cultural fit", I don't think it's been the predominant meaning historically.
As far as I'm aware, "cultural fit" has often been a tool of exclusion to e.g. justify not hiring a woman because they wouldn't be a good cultural fit in a place where all the guys talk about women as sex objects, or not hiring someone who's gay as they wouldn't be a good cultural fit where everyone makes fun of the homos, etc...
But it's more subtle than that. If all the devs in a team grew up watching a bunch of white middle-class sitcoms as kids (e.g. Friends, or whatever the early-'00s equivalent would be for junior devs these days) and those are their cultural touchstones, then someone who grew up not watching those show because they didn't speak to their life, is not going to get the same cultural references as them. And so "lack of cultural fit" can be used to enforce homogeneity, not only without needing an actual policy of not hiring people from working-class minority backgrounds, but without the people in charge of hiring even needing to consciously realise that's what they're doing! It enables the kind of systemic marginalisation that can be perpetuated by well-meaning people completely by accident.
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Looking back up-thread now, I think your definition might actually have been what the GP commenter was getting at. But it wasn't obviously so (at least, not obviously enough for me!) and without another explicit qualifier, "cultural fit" threw up a sizable red flag that I couldn't resist taking a swipe at.
Thanks for taking the time to write a thoughtful response that made me look at the previous comment in less reflexive light.
My definition of culture talks about the working values and processes in a company. Some engineers want to be given full problems and be left alone to solve them. Some engineers want to be given specifications on what to build and just turn to code.
Some engineers don't work well in an org without robust automated tests. Others are fine to leave it to QA and toss it over. Some really love agile environments, and some hate them. Some like large organizations where you can be a deep expert in a small piece, and some prefer to be a generalist getting software off the ground.
People have different preferences regarding async communications versus meetings. And even more fundamentally, some people want to go home at the end of the day and forget about work while others want to feel like they're in something so important that they can obsess over. (Most of us are a bit in the middle, but both extremes there exist.)
Culture fit isn't (or shouldn't be) if people like to go drinking at the end of the shift, or if they like to talk about sci-fi or if you fit into the top end of the kyriarchy. (And if that is part of a company's cultural fit, it's going to be toxic in other ways, but as you say, widely marginalized groups and cultures are going to be affected much more here.)