This is absolutely correct. Companies can and should discriminate against anyone who wouldn't be a good culture fit for any number of reasons. I don't fault anyone who has ever refused to hire me for personal reasons. At the end of the day, a company is a group of people working together toward a common goal. Company is Latin for those you break bread with, and although companies aren't usually that close-knit (modern business lunches don't have the same level of trust and closeness as an ancient meal) the point is still the same: you're a team.
You are a team, but you should still attempt to be objective enough in your evaluation to determine whether a new person will allow you to be a functional team. But when you say "culture fit", the implication is that the team would prefer not to change at all, not that it would accept changing into a different-yet-comparably-productive team.
Maybe I used culture fit the wrong way. I just meant the ability to get along in non-trivial situations and communicate effectively. I've met people who I have so little in common with that we couldn't even share a joke in either direction, because the recipient just couldn't understand it at all. It was so difficult to accomplish even basic things because our experiences were so different that we didn't have common ground to work from. Not that a similar sense of humor is necessary, but having at least some commonality is necessary if you're going to be able to solve problems together.
> It was so difficult to accomplish even basic things because our experiences were so different that we didn't have common ground to work from.
I am curious what kind of work this was, if you can share.
I had a lot of difficulty in the past when working in situations where there was "life-experience" context to the problem space that was not shared by the whole team.
But we had to get the job done so we worked around it.
I think in the end the need to be more explicit, to provide more context and to work towards abstract descriptions of problems was also a positive.
I've never heard "try to make lemonade" only "make lemonade"
In my experience difficult problems can be solved if people keep a good attitude and are invested in making things work, even when success seems unlikely.
But sometimes you will fail.
I was interested to know what sort of problem space the parent had their bad experience in, and to hear more about how things didn't work out. I don't doubt that there are domains where a "can do attitude" will not cut it.
And definitely nobody says, “try to make lemonade...”. That goes against the saying, I agree.
My point was just that even when you take the “when life gives you lemons” approach sometimes you won’t be getting that lemonade after all. As such, I also didn’t think it to be the best phrase for what (I thought) you were trying to convey.
I agree with your reply, 100%. Thinking a bit more as I write this, I may be wrong above (in this reply; about the wrong phrase) and it is, in fact, the best idiom. Not sure. But now I’m definitely on the fence, at least (compared to above, where I was on one side of the fence).
