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.