[belandrew]

The fundamental argument is that if you hire more similar people, you will get similar results. Are you a billionaire yet? If not, maybe you should hire some different types of people in order to deliver different results.

People with different mindsets will challenge you. They will disagree with your decisions. They will think of different approaches that may be much better than what you are doing. If you let them, they may drastically improve your business.

Are your friends the best fit for the job? What if someone likes different music and whatever but is ten times as effective at that type of position? I would consider the latter far more important. You're hiring people to do a job, not socialize with.

[facepalm]

"People with different mindsets will challenge you. They will disagree with your decisions."

Which might significantly slow you down. Maybe there are different times for different approaches.

And if you just want a job done, why would you want to hire somebody who disagrees with you?

[facepalm]

Another question: how would you hire, then? Just a programming test? Ideally anonymous, so that no prejudice can sneak into the assessment?

[hackinthebochs]

Programming test, discussing past experience (things they did, things they're proud of, where things went wrong, etc), etc. You're attempting to determine passion and curiosity by doing a "joel test", which is poor because you're biasing it towards people who have the same history as you. A better alternative is to ask for opinions, people who have opinions about programming practices/paradigms/languages/etc is a good signal for someone who is curious about their craft. Uncurious people never think deeply about what they're doing. People who care form opinions and ideas about what is good vs bad. It doesn't really matter what the opinions are, just that they have them and have some rationale for backing it up.

Examples: What is your opinion of Javascript as a lanaguage? * Whats your favorite language/least favorite language that you use/worst feature of your favorite language? Whats your opinion of the state of web development/how would you improve it? Static vs Dynamic typing? Functional vs Object oriented?