Heathers

The new bosses are always just a worse version of the old bosses.  Somehow we keep not figuring that out.

The theme is familiar to anyone who’s tried to join a country club or high-school clique. It’s not supposed to make sense. The Culture can’t really be written about; it has to be experienced. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth. What wearing a suit really indicates is—I am not making this up—non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up.

Clothing is the least of it. Your entire lifestyle and outside interests are under examination, as is your “commitment”. Say you’re asked out for coffee on short notice, which you decline because you’re busy. Is that a “ding”? Did that lose you the job? Who knows? Maybe it did. You’re still trying to figure out what they mean by “wowing” them. Should you ask? Maybe you’ll seem desperate if you ask. Oh, shit!

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.

Once upon a time, young go-getter douchebags wore suits to job interviews.  But that was "disrupted" by  a new kind of "culture fit" involving young go-getter douchebags who do not wear suits to job interviews.  And the difference is... what, exactly?

Well, mostly nothing of course, except nowadays the pressure to conform to the company culture can extend deep into the employee's personal and social life.  This happens for various reasons some having to do with popular fashion others having to do with the way technology has eroded personal privacy. 

But there comes a point where we have to decide where the boss's purview over our individual lifestyle choices ends. And we're pushing  the line in an uncomfortable direction. 

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act violated a federal law protecting religious freedom. It was, a dissent said, “a decision of startling breadth.”

The 5-to-4 ruling, which applied to two companies owned by Christian families, opened the door to many challenges from corporations over laws that they claim violate their religious liberty.

It's bad enough if failing the "culture fit" test means the company doesn't like to have coffee or play hoops with you. But sometimes it's also the company doesn't care for your unapproved fucking activities.  And, see, that's much more of an obvious downer but it's really the same principle at work.