The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture
The problem is that Silicon Valley has gone completely to the other extreme. We’ve created a make-believe cult of objective meritocracy, a pseudo-scientific mythos to obscure and reinforce the belief that only people who look and talk like us are worth noticing. After making such a show of burning down the bad old rules of business, the new ones we’ve created seem pretty similar.
Because the talent market is tight, that insularity presents a problem. It’s hard to find good people to hire. All the Stanford graduates have offers from multiple companies and there’s no time to develop talent. On the other hand, so many nice-seeming candidates seem to fail the interview process for trivial mistakes that fall under the catch-all category of “culture fit.”
Let’s review the bidding. A capable professional expressed interest in working for a company. Instead of talking with her about that in plain English, she was held at arm’s length for days while The Culture examined her for defects: coffee dates in the afternoon, conversations over dinner. When she gets the invisible nod, her reward is a “spontaneous” invitation to a night of drinking with the team. You have to wonder why intelligent people would devise an interview process so strange and oblique that the candidate doesn’t even know it’s happening.
...Again Max Levchin: “PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job.”
The obscurity and arbitrariness are very much by design, and is why explainer posts are supposed to be so valuable. Having engineered an unfair situation, insiders then offer secret guides to winning it.
Read the full story here; http://qz.com/225782/the-next-thing-silicon-valley-needs-to-disrupt-big-time-its-own-culture/?curator=MediaREDEF#/h/80696,3,80701,2/