The case for being the culture hire

As the tech world orgiastically competes for who can be the most disciplined, most execution focused, and most technical, I’m here to pitch something else: just be fun to work with.

LinkedIn and general manosphere content will have you believe that career success is predicated on discipline, wakeup time, and steroid consumption. I’m here to pitch you a different vision of the world: embody the mentality of the culture hire.

With a wink and a smile, I proudly tell everyone I work with that I’m a culture hire. Being a culture hire connotes being kept around because you’re fun to hang out with. It implies that you’re less motivated by the pleasures of the job, and more by the pleasures of others’ company. But being fun to hang out with is one of the best ways to become successful.

Whatever career progression I’ve had across product, marketing, and sales, I think I can assign to two things: 1) being reasonably good at my job. This is an important baseline, and competency is table stakes. 2) Being fun to work with.

How to be fun to work with

Being fun to work with is important: it helps you get stuff done as you build goodwill with people you need to ask for help. It’s important for team health: in product part of my responsibility, ideally, is that the team is healthy and executing. But more important than anything else - being fun to work with brings other fun people into your fold. Energy attracts energy, and over the course of a long career, having fun people around you is one of the best metrics to shoot for, because nothing powers career longevity and consistency like enjoying yourself. Work can be fun if you care about what you’re doing, have an ability to take the right things seriously, and can laugh at the rest. And there will be many times where you need to laugh.

Being fun to work with is an energy you bring to your job: some part of it is innate. I’m a good fit for a fun coworker because I’m relatively extroverted, have a great sense of humour, and spend my days scouring twitter for topical conversations to discuss. But anyone can be the fun coworker. It begins, as so much of this relationship building stuff does, with being interested in other people and being willing to share things about yourself.

Being fun to work with means you listen to people, you care about them, and you spend time with them at company socials. It requires being able to laugh, and having the humility to laugh at yourself. Sometimes it means stepping around the sterile rigidity of many workplace cultural norms. It doesn’t require a total marriage of work and private life, but sometimes it leads to that anyway, and always for the better.

Fun as a competitive advantage

Tech culture is full of thinkpieces about how you should build agency, discipline, and more recently, taste. All of these are important, but you can get just as much done by being fun at work: fun people with ideas are persuasive, and they make people want to participate. People pay attention to fun people when they speak at a presentation because they hook them with a few laughs early on. Engineers willingly join meetings they set up because they’re a little more entertaining. Teams connect more because fun people care to set up great events for the group. Rare is the employee who can be both great at their job and lots of fun to spend time with, and when you find someone like that, it supercharges the company.

Working at big companies, you start to figure out just how much impact one person can have. Because company building, like many other things, often comes down to a small number of big wins. That one project, experiment or sale can completely change the trajectory of a business. I read sometimes that all that’s important is execution; the best team will keep executing until it wins. I don’t know if I agree - sometimes capturing the moment with one burst of energy changes everything. As Jeff Bezos put very well:

"We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score one thousand runs.”

Fun people who are passionate about their work are typically high energy, high optimism, and high agency, and this blend of traits is perfect for rallying people around interesting projects. I’ve seen people low on the career ladder dramatically improve the companies they work for, and I’ve seen people high up on the career ladder suck the energy out of an entire function. Don’t be the latter, and don’t diminish your spark by following boring LinkedIn templates for living a disciplined life. In a world where execution is getting easier with tools like ChatGPT, your biggest advantage is that people love working with you. As execution gets commoditised, what remains is how you make people feel. Don’t be boring - become the culture hire.