Because culture does matter, even in tech.<p>Consider a company where social inclusion is important. That&#x27;d be a terrible culture fit for me. When debating a technical choice, I&#x27;ll say &quot;do we all agree to run X experiment, outcome Y =&gt; choice A, outcome Z =&gt; choice B? Then we can all STFU and stop arguing.&quot; In the happy&#x2F;social&#x2F;fun environment, this is terrible. The promoters of B might feel unhappy, harming team cohesion, and that could be <i>more important</i> than 10% lower latency.<p>On the flip side, consider the confrontational &quot;put up or shut up&quot; environment I tend to prefer (and create). In this environment, &quot;you suck at SQL&quot; is just a factual statement that you can choose to remedy or not. Some folks really don&#x27;t like being told &quot;experiment failed, your idea is wrong, be smarter next time&quot;. Even if they are technically competent, they need a form of social interaction at work that they don&#x27;t get.<p>There are a variety of cultural dimensions like this that matter. Another is implicit vs explicit - whether you can navigate implicit job responsibilities or they need to be spelled out. Much as we&#x27;d like to act like we are just machines taking money as input and code as outputs, this stuff does matter.