That's a valid point and I'm not sure why people are downvoting you.

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.

I'm not okay with somebody expecting me to be their friend if they hire me. I'm here to make software, not lend emotional support.

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.

Friendship isn't really about emotional support. To think that working in a high-level position at a growing company doesn't require getting along with people is incredibly naïve.

In my experience "getting along" is a large spectrum and working with someone professionaly isn't the same thing as going to a beer with them. I've had extremely productive professional relationship with several people I wouldn't go out to grab a beer with (mostly because they were at different stages in life and we didn't really have much to talk about).

Filtering via non-professional social occasions is pretty much the worst part of the bro culture.

This is a good point. Depending on the stage of the company and the type of people working there it is very possible to have productive working relationships that would never extend to events outside the office.

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.

Of course you have to be able to get along with people, but friendship is way more than just getting along with people. It's being involved in each other's personal lives for non-business reasons.

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.

You're filtering out people who don't drink alcohol.

That probably doesn't have much to do with whether they're any good at the job or whether you like working with them.

Actually, wouldn't you expect drinking to correlate negatively with a programmer's output? Whatever bullshit people say about drugs enhancing their output, I've never heard similar bullshit about alcohol/hangover being a stimulant and if someone drinks a lot there's a decent chance they'd program when drunk or hungover.

(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.)

Obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/323/

Even in a startup environment with a keg in the office, I wouldn't typically drink and code, besides perhaps a Friday afternoon beer.

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.

Bingo. Implementing features doesn't usually require it, but keeping an entire system in your head with all its complexity and chain reactions from making something work another way keeps me from moving ahead sometimes -- especially when it isn't clear what the best option is. A beer or two helps me pick one and keep moving, to discover the answer as I go.

> You're filtering out people who don't drink alcohol.

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.

It's indirect discrimination against people with a religion that forbids drinking alcohol or people with a disability that prevents them drinking alcohol.

You can try to rationalise it, but you should be aware that you're just justifying your cognitive biases.

> 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 really not an equal opportunity employer.

I'm always surprised when people open themselves up for legal liability like this.

IANAL, but if a US company has fewer than 15 employees, they are exempt from many of the equal employment laws.

You forgot gender from your list, as per your story.

You don't sound "pained", you sound complicit.

Feel free to start your own startup and outcompete me with the people that I choose not to hire.

Otherwise, you basically prove me correct.

You're the one in a position of power with the ability to change things, you coward.

> you coward

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News, even if you find a comment reprehensible.

..not to take any side here, but to bully other people for having other opinions is more a reddit than a hn thing.

Cognitive bias (and dissonance) is heavily involved in the maintenance of religious belief.

You mean hiring echo chambers is an essential thing?

Considering the vast majority of startups fail, maybe this is one aspect that needs rethinking.