[nscalf]

Work actually is a social club. You don't need to love everyone, but you shouldn't feel uncomfortable. If you're unhappy at work, your work will suffer. If you're excited about what you're doing and you have your team's back, then you will deliver more value. Excellent engineers can be a good find, but teams build excellent things. There is a reason everyone doesn't work in isolation.

[wysifnwyg]

Unless you own the company, you don't pick all your managers, coworkers, and clients. It's an exceptionally valuable team skill to be able to work with someone you wouldn't invite out for a beer. Learning to work with different viewpoints and behaviors builds character and makes one more competitive. Effective managers know this.

[nscalf]

You don't need to pick all of your managers, coworkers, and clients. That's the point of vetting a company culture before you join. In general, the culture should be a reflection of a shared ideology for business and interpersonal behavior. There is a ton of room for variety within that, but it pins some underlying important traits.

Being a good culture fit does not mean you have to like them so much that you're inviting them out for a beer. And in order to really be a long term competitive company and team, you need to be able to be unified first. If there is significant internal turmoil, or people are unmotivated, uncomfortable, threatened, etc. you will never be competitive. "Building character" is generally code for "deal with this crappy situation", and life is too short to make people miserable. You can get a diverse group of people without making all of them unhappy if you select for people who can work together.

[wysifnwyg]

More important than any culture fit is for a business to make a profit. Without that, there's no business to begin with, and while I concede that different traits can make that easier or harder, a good manager can make a team where none would have emerged without them. It's repeated often that employees don't quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers.

A good manager will inspire motivation, bring comfort, foster a nonthreatening environment with an appropriate level of conflict, and shape a competitive force to be reckoned with. This does not mean creating a hug box. Not having a hug box doesn't mean employees have to be unhappy. It's bad managers whose ineffectiveness allows negative traits (which everybody has) to impact other employees.