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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

> “do you want to have a beer/coffee/social interaction with the person outside of work”

Unfiltered and unanalyzed, this is a bad metric because it essentially brings out the lowest-level mental evaluation of whether the person fits your tribe or not. It’s easily subtly biased against women, introverts, other ethnicities, etc. — not because you hate them but because your lizard-brain doesn’t automatically associate them with comfort.

Instead think about whether you’d want to hang out with the person, and then try to intellectually disregard that evaluation completely.

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I think both extremes are problematic; while you (rightly) cover the cliquey/othering/representation side, the counter is the introduction of people to the team who - at best - cannot or will not socially integrate, and at worst are positively frictional and demoralizing.

You see this happen a lot when (say) poor management look too much at cost or box-ticking over team morale and competence.

"Can they do the job?" and "can we get on with them?" are both important questions for a healthy team, but yes, it is important that those questions are asked in an open-minded spirit.

Working with someone professionally is not the same as a beer buddy. In fact, I value having colleagues who are distinct enough from me that I would feel a bit uncomfortable having them over/hanging out (e.g. political views, humor, world view), as long as they are 100% professional and technically excellent. Btw .. a lot of technically excellent people do not drink (religion or just choice), and a bunch of people would likely be classified on the ASD scale. Your colleagues DO NOT need to be your buddies.

I recall when I was in a team that was super buddy-buddy and everyone would hang out and go drinking, everyone shared the same view, etc. When we had a major crisis in the office, things devolved into a shouting match in a manner that may be okay with buddies but not in a professional environment.

You've read too much into my "can we get on with them?" which is just about having common ground and relaxed relations at work, nothing to do with drinking, being buddies etc.

thank you for explaining the thought much better than i did

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