Right. I've had a great time having lunch daily with some groups of co-workers. Others have been boring as hell and there's no way I'm going to spend an interminable extra 30-60 minutes making small talk with them.

If you know that's on the cards when hiring, then I'm sure it's a filter you might not use otherwise, i.e. can I handle having this person at the lunch table every day.

Does anyone not feel a sense of unease when applying all of these "social" filters to hiring decisions? The end result here is you end up hiring people exactly like yourself (and the rest of the group). Being able to do the job well is no longer enough; you have to be "interesting" enough to spend an hour with at lunch everyday. What this essentially comes down to is you need to also be a part of the same culture with the same personality type. This is a very insipid form of discrimination and sadly it seems to have widespread support.

I agree. I've been fortunate enough to work with mostly interesting people over the years where a few have become life long friends. I've also been to offices where lunch was dreaded because most people there you didn't want to have to interact with anymore than required.

I don't need to work with best friends, but if I hated spending any social time with my co-workers I would find another job.