Edit: Not sure why the down votes. For anyone that's worked in a seed/pre-seed startup, this is absolutely an essential thing.
I think the litmus test should be, "do I not dislike spending a lot of time with this person", not "do I really like spending time with this person". Shooting the shit over beers and foosball is really testing for the latter, not the former.
Plus let's face it, a lot of technically gifted and experienced people ain't exactly extroverts. And people act different when they know they're being evaluated anyway. So some founders' insistence on fratting it up for step one of the hiring process just strikes me as stupid.
And by the way...I'm a tall, white, former college athlete male. I'm VERY comfortable in a "drinking beer in bars with dudes" environment; it's what I often do with my friends on my own time. I'd likely be even more opinionated about this if I were not as naturally comfortable in a bro-y environment.
That said, we're all still just people, and if we're gonna be friends, we'll be friends. That usually sorts itself out just from sharing circumstances.
Filtering via non-professional social occasions is pretty much the worst part of the bro culture.
But that doesn't mean a first meeting outside the office over beer or coffee isn't a good idea. It isn't necessarily part of "bro culture" either.
I've found that it's a good way to have a conversation with someone to get a feel for what they like to think about, and hopefully learn a little bit about what kind of decision maker someone is.
When someone is explicitly looking to hire not just colleagues but new personal friends, it can be a sign of immaturity, and that they might not be great at understanding boundaries.
On the other hand, there are probably some people who would like that kind of a work environment. No harm is done if the potential employer is up front about it, at least they're being open about what they want. Much more awkward to take the job and get surprised by Overly Attached Coworkers if that's not what you want.
That probably doesn't have much to do with whether they're any good at the job or whether you like working with them.
(Personally I've tried once to program when drunk - I ate nothing the whole morning and drank half a bottle of wine, which is more than enough for me given my very little drinking experience; I couldn't stop laughing at any joke by the guy we drank with - or at pretty much anything he said, really. I did write pretty decent code in the couple of hours it took me to become sober again, in retrospect, and I think it actually gave me courage to tackle the shit I had to at that moment, but then I thought about it all a lot before getting drunk and it was almost done and all I had to do was finish it. It didn't feel like I'd do very well in general in that condition.)
That said, for personal projects in the evenings, I find having 1-2 drinks helpful for removing barriers to perfectionism when you have simple coding tasks to solve.
I might consider that valuable information. I also might consider whether you can drink a responsible amount of alcohol useful information.
Especially at single-digit employee stage, just about anybody might wind up doing marketing or sales calls.
Not drinking alcohol can be a large handicap in that instance.
You can try to rationalise it, but you should be aware that you're just justifying your cognitive biases.
Or acknowledging the biases in my industry.
Try sending a woman to close a deal with a Japanese company. You're gonna get a veiled request to send the actual man in charge, if they don't consider themselves insulted and simply torch the deal. (In this instance, it was the woman herself who warned us not to do this. It was very funny, because we always brought her along as a "secretary", "assistant", etc. She was actually CTO and extremely fluent in Japanese. We got quite a bit of information because somebody said something stupid in Japanese right in front of her "secretary" act. Only one company recognized her and called us on it--we all had a good laugh making fun of the stupid old guard and wound up with the contract, but I digress ...)
Try closing a deal for defense contracting. I can't tell you the number of contracts where the signature occurred in or near a strip club. This has gotten better--it was WAY worse even 10 years ago--20 years ago it was ridiculous.
As much as it pains me, as a startup founder, I'm really not an equal opportunity employer. I'm looking for people who can fill roles that I know I need filled. If someone can't fill some important role because of religious belief, moral stance, health status, need to telecommute, inability to fly regularly, etc. I'm simply not going to hire them until I get bigger.
I'm always surprised when people open themselves up for legal liability like this.
Otherwise, you basically prove me correct.
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News, even if you find a comment reprehensible.
Considering the vast majority of startups fail, maybe this is one aspect that needs rethinking.
Turned down the job in favor of a bigger, more corporate experience.
Surprise surprise, a few months later, the start up in question was lambasted for being the exact stereotype of a dudebro startup, from underpaying its employees and expecting them to work 16 hour days to outright sexual harassment.
It feels so...frat boy to me, and I was never a frat boy.
While it is an obvious culture to examine, realize that most companies (and certainly all startups) have a cultural expectation. Sometimes it is as highly overt as the above, but other times it is a quieter expectation that is more in keeping with mainstream corporate American culture.
For example, in many companies not caring about sports can make casual conversations and friendly connections with coworkers difficult. Also, certain departments (such as IT) can be overwhelmingly focused on standard geek culture.
It is a really tough and interesting problem to examine. A strong culture can bind a team together in fantastically productive ways. However, a strong culture can also lead to groupthink and exclude voices that would help build an even better team. The exclusionary aspect can also be seen as sexist/racist/bigoted from an outside perspective even though it is doubtful that the team intends it that way.
On balance, I think a founder focusing on the type of culture they want is good as it allows both founder and employees have a clear understanding of what the jobs expectations. That said, a culture of beer-and-foosball hardly seems like the most productive and conducive to success.
There's the 'soft' cultural variation of expected work hours (duration and placement during the day), remote vs. in-office only, single 20 somethings that work all the time vs. mature family focused that aims to have a healthy work-life balance, star wars vs. star trek, etc.
Some of those soft things can really matter to long term happiness of both the employer and employee.
Then there's the critical 'hard' cultural variations.
Is it a culture of sticking with the tried and true tech stack and focusing on reframing the tech challenges to fit that stack? Or a culture where NewFunStack.js made by Behemoth Tech Company should be used?
Strangely enough I bet both sides of the debate would say they're a culture of focusing on "getting stuff done". I've seen people be highly productive in both approaches, so I'm inclined to say its more a cultural fit question than anything else.
https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.fan.star...
Their differences have tended to be less in recent years as both franchises have become "cool".
You are conflating "strong" with "exclusionary".
>The exclusionary aspect can also be seen as sexist/racist/bigoted from an outside perspective even though it is doubtful that the team intends it that way.
Team members have to be very callous not to realize that an exclusionary culture is, well, excluding people.
Sometimes they do, and it's not about "brodude startup"
If there are some founders and they share a vision/way of doing things that's their culture already and that's how the company is going to do things.
I'm not saying it's bad, quite the contrary.
What's your focus? What's your way of solving problems? How do you prioritise stuff?
I work where I do now largely because my friends do. I mean, if you're going to spend 60 hours a week in close-ish quarters with people, it'd be nice if you enjoyed it as much as possible.
Granted, there is an extreme, and there are discrimination laws, but I do want to spend time with people I get along with.
imo company culture isnt how a company acts
it is how people within treat each other
> CEO: cool man lets grab a couple beers
> me: (over beers) hi i'm here for the lead developer position
> CEO: yeah dude but are you any good at foosball?
> me: (over foosball) i'm here for the lead developer position
This is surprisingly common and not just for hiring technical roles. I find it especially odd when founders do it in the process of hiring their first few employees....it's like dude, you don't even have a culture yet, why do you care about culture fit?
It would be impossible to quantify but I wonder how many good ideas tackled by good founders never got off the ground because they were overly fixated on getting the first 10 hires EXACTLY right.