Competence trumps a good cultural fit

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Competence trumps a good cultural fit

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TravisDBA SSCoach Points: 15780 More actions · Answer 1

As a prior boss of mine said some years ago and I still remember it to this day. "I did not hire you for your sparkling personality, I hired you to take care of our productoin databases and make sure NO developers try and screw them up with their sloppy code changes.":-D

"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004356 More actions · Answer 2

I went back and reread a lot of the posts on this thread. A lot of them talk about one extreme or another or both extremes.

We're not trying to build something like Google at work and I suspect that most companies aren't. We're also not a 90's-style dotcom with fooshball tables and Nerf guns being the tools of choice. We're also not a bunch of stuffed-shirts that toe the line every minute. We're friends from different walks of life with different skills and we have a common goal.

In order to achieve that goal, we need to communicate with each other, QA people, users, customers, hardware folks, and managers and we need to be good at what we do. We need people with the right blend of skills and cultural fit. Competence does not trump a good culteral fit and a good culteral fit does not trump competence... at least not where I work.

In other words, we just want good, normal people that can do the job well and that's what we hire. 🙂

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

Antares686 SSC Guru Points: 125444 More actions · Answer 3

I think this was a very good perspective that there a re a lot of exteremely amazing candidates getting overlooked simply becuase they can't mesh with a group. I have met a few very smart people who I would love to throw through a wall becuase of how irritating they were in person. LOL

That said, I have been fortunate in that I can work in the office or from home. But we have spaces here we can occupy if we desire, although some frown on it, when we want to hash out a process. Some of us have even been known to camp out in these rooms for weeks on end. But I do think having private space to draw back into to stay focused is a solid requirement for some folsk to really excel. It can be hard to get through the noise of life and headphones don't afford quiet. Right no I am sitting here and can here four phone conversations at the same time, none of which pertain to my work. This at times can clutter my thoughts and make it difficult to acheive solid results quickly. When it is quiet I can fly through desings.

I don't think the greats were really all that non-social, they just became accustomed to it and thrived through adaption. However, as time proceeded it became the natural state for them. So I don't fully agree that the future greats can't be social and just as great as those form the past.

TravisDBA SSCoach Points: 15780 More actions · Answer 4

Jeff Moden (10/1/2013)
Competence does not trump a good culteral fit and a good culteral fit does not trump competence... at least not where I work.
🙂

Geez, what a refreshing idea.:-D

"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"

Jim P. SSCrazy Eights Points: 8725 More actions · Answer 5

Jeff Moden (10/1/2013)
Competence does not trump a good cultural fit and a good cultural fit does not trump competence... at least not where I work.
In other words, we just want good, normal people that can do the job well and that's what we hire. 🙂

My prior company I helped build the job description I was hired in for. The second position (DBA) they built the job description to move me into.

My current company had a new position that I was hired for. It was a support DBA position on the help desk. I can communicate decently with others on staff. I can communicate decently with our customer's IT staff. Usually the customer's senior staff is doable. But it is rare that the normal end-user and I can talk. My company realized this early on after they hired me in. They were more than willing to build a "ring" around me using the rest of the support staff between me and the end user. That was because I was fixing setup issues on the third day I came in the door, and then was fixing application issues within a month. I also am now supporting the internal networking team with other things.

Now nearly five years down the road I am still finding and resolving issues that could have taken up to a week to resolve prior and is now down to forty minutes. Most of that is getting users out the system.

My boss has said more than once she would dread her job without me in the team mix. I never want to manage people. I can do a short term team.

So I might not be your idea of the ideal employee, but I have enough conceit to think that I could probably fit in most companies that have a real job description and not a pipe dream. If the guy can talk to the end users and still be smart enough to fix the application errors I would question the reality.

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Jim P.

A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.