6 ms·

Ask HN: Why not replace technical job interviews with yearly standardized exams?

11 points by amichail 2y ago

Wouldn't this eliminate cheating (due to question reuse), shorten interviews, and save money?

paulcole 2y ago
Would it be offered any time I want to take it or is it only available to take once a year? If the latter why would I take it if I’m happy in my job? What happens if I don’t take it and get laid off later in the year? How someone talks during their technical job interview should be seen as equally important to the content of what they say during it. Will there be an oral component of your exam? Are there different exams for different languages/technologies and industries? How many exams do I have to take? Do people cheat on the yearly standardized exams in place (that are used, for university entrance, for example) now? Do hiring companies tend to believe that their needs are very similar to other hiring companies? How much faith would they put in such a standardized exam?
- amichail 2y ago
  The yearly standardized exams could be company-specific. So, if you want to apply for a software engineering position at Google, you would have to take the yearly Google standardized exam for software engineers.
  - b20000 2y ago
    i am against companies taking over education, sorry this limits people’s mobility as they are then glued to a set of company specific skills
    - amichail 2y ago
      The exam could test for general abilities of importance to Google rather than Google specific technologies.
      - b20000 2y ago
        not sure if you realize how idiotic this sounds
        paulcole 2y ago
        Narrator: He did not realize how idiotic this sounds.
    - j45 2y ago
      Universities are companies too. There is lots of education that can’t happen that companies have to fend for themselves and create materials to teach. 70% of learning is informal learning, outside of the classroom. The master/apprentice model has existed for so long for a reason. Learning the work is best done beside experience.
      - b20000 2y ago
        PRIVATE universities maybe. I graduated at a public university. companies need to educate you on the job. that will never change and it is unreasonable to demand you already have all skills ready to go. but that is where we are in the US…. it is also crazy that you need to copy paste job requirements into your CV role per role. a resume or CV is something you make ONCE. but i guess HR drones are too dumb to read so that is where we are.
        j45 2y ago
        We pay one group to teach us and expect a different group to pay us and teach us? Reality for the many might be somewhere in the middle, off to one side.. there’s academic organizations with billions not pushing it off into organizations with millions to deliver what students paid tuition for.. relatively speaking? Companies don’t always have to hire graduates to educate them on the job. Profession and career development so important but a part of the work. It’s a skewed tech reality distortion field where tech companies compete by playing defence to tie up labour so others can’t grow… that results in those pesky mass layoffs. Repeatedly. Organizations very well may take over educating the workforce and leverage it like salarymen in Japan, low pay for lots of hours and stability. Not sure if I like that either. Or maybe they’ll just take the demands for remote work locally and let it be a global market. In the scenarios where a company is paying to educate you .. for free .. in addition to paying you a salary.. to learn? That you’ll become more valuable with, not necessarily give back or create value greater than what you’ve been paid, in addition to you paying an academic institution money to learn.. often under debt is.. sound? The gap between academic degrees and the workforce is generally increasing without cherry picking small groups as exceptions. Historically, Universities that taught you how to think didn’t have STEM. They consciously moved from liberal arts into into stem for the funding opportunities. Most of all I believe everyone has a right to learn and access opportunities to improve their life. The above doesn’t sound like it’s meant to speed that up. Happy to learn from other perspectives.
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    Most companies wouldn’t want to spend the time making company specific exams so they would buy some off the shelf exams and we are back to Leetcode problem.
    - amichail 2y ago
      If a company can't afford to make its own exams, then it could still look at the results of a more general standardized yearly exam.
      - paulcole 2y ago
        Who administers the more general standardized yearly exam?
  - paulcole 2y ago
    Oh sick so I could just ask my friends who took it earlier in the year for the answers?
OfficeChad 2y ago
This is idiotic.
- j45 2y ago
  Or perfect for anyone upset by it and not sharing why. Might be something to hide.
b20000 2y ago
you mean like go to university and get a real CS degree and have companies use that to give you a job? oh wait… this was supposed to be how it works but then some indian dude came along and made a platform and then some woman wrote a book and got in a HR decision making position in a FAANG and destroyed the value of everyone’s degrees by introducing coding interviews you can only pass if you grind them
- amichail 2y ago
  No, the exam would be standardized. There would be no need for a CS degree and you would need to take the exam even if you do have a CS degree.
  - b20000 2y ago
    that is what university is for
    - throwaway48540 2y ago
      Most of the best developers I hired never went to a university.
      - j45 2y ago
        And if they did, there’s a strong element of being self-taught.
    - j45 2y ago
      No, it’s not. At all. But it’s what they’d like you to believe. Development teams benefit from both self taught and university taught developers. Self taught developers bring a different perspective.
thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
Like certifications (A+, Linux+, RHCE, RHCSA, CISSP, etc.), but specifically for software developers? Sounds like a business opportunity: https://education.oracle.com/java-certification-benefits/certstep https://education.oracle.com/java-certification-benefits/cer... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/browse/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/browse/ https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-developer-associate/ https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-developer-ass... "Save money"? This would make money. Just think how much businesses would pay to keep their employees' credentials current! You could also charge exorbitant fees for training, books, and videos people would use to prepare for the exams. Maybe you could even setup a school business built on teaching people stuff for all the exams and then give them an "everything" certificate after they took all the exams the school had? Oh, wait.
- amichail 2y ago
  If that worked, why would tech companies still have in-depth technical interviews?
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Most interview processes are for making decision-makers feel better, not for finding the best candidate. Very few companies use interviews with a theoretical basis, let alone an evidential basis.
    - drewcoo 2y ago
      And most decisions of any kind are made emotionally, then explained with post hoc rationalizations. To magically seem logical and objective, you can withhold your decision until you've explained the rationalizations. Consider also the typical engineering "which thing should we buy" matrix, which is often thinly masked biases of the author and arguing points against other views from the team. Consider also the rationalizations in design docs ("why we should make it like this") that barely seem to cover up the designer's favorite methods and tools that are actually driving things. We spend a lot of time/energy trying to seem logical when we're fundamentally not.
giantg2 2y ago
This is perhaps even worse than the state of interviews today. The exams mean very little. They are easy to study for and tell almost nothing about a candidates performance, just knowledge. If we wanted to go this route, we'd be using GPAs to differentiate candidates, but that rarely seems to be a factor today.
- amichail 2y ago
  The standardized exam could include computer programming under time pressure.
  - throwaway48540 2y ago
    When I'm doing an interview, I really don't care much about the code being written; I don't even care if it runs, is correct on some percentage/point scale or whatever else like that. I care about how they're thinking about it, how they react to my hints, how they act when they are stuck, if they ask for help or not, if they try to cover up what they don't know or that they made a mistake or are open and honest about it and treat it as an opportunity to learn, etc. A standardized exam result won't give me any of this information/experience. I'm going to be especially suspicious with people who have a perfect score, experience has shown me that the best engineers often (not always) don't have great academic results, while those who had perfect results often can't function well independently in a real-world unstructured environment.
    - amichail 2y ago
      You don't care about ranking in the International Olympiad in Informatics?
      - throwaway48540 2y ago
        Interesting curiosity, but it says nothing about their ability to function in a real world software engineering organization - so we're going to be coding on the interview anyways. The interview is really not just about the coding skill itself, that's actually the much less important part of it.
sircastor 2y ago
I feel like the answer is that people like their gate-keeping. There are a lot of programmers who like being part of a special club and want to manage who gets in. It’s couched behind meritocracy, but I think it can be boiled down to gate-keeping.
keiferski 2y ago
Same reason that Ivy League admissions aren’t based on anything that could be considered objective. The gatekeepers don’t want them to be.
palata 2y ago
I see two kinds of technical job interviews: the FAANG style and the rest. Let's start with the latter: the problem is that not every company wants exactly the same developer profile. Acing a standardized exam means that you are really good at what the exam is testing. But because you excel at leetcode interviews really does not mean that you are the best fit for most companies in the world. Maybe this company will want somebody with experience in a specific framework ("we have a Qt mobile app", "we work with Laravel", "we write firmwares", ...), that company will want something with domain knowledge ("we need someone who understands the medical domain", "we need someone who understands maritime navigation", ...). You can't standardize that. For the small parts you could standardize, it exists: a CS degree, "5 years experience as a dev", etc. For the former, it seems to me that it is already pretty much standardized. When you interview for FAANG companies, you need to read a lot about the interview process and prepare it like you would prepare an exam. If you are super ready for the interview at Meta, you are also super ready for Google. It is some kind of standard already. Maybe the FAANGs could team together to share the exams, but the economy would be marginal (otherwise they would have done it).
j45 2y ago
Skills and competency assessments are a great idea. One piece is naming sure the assessments and competency assessors have competency. You could get reasonably far with a core set of skills and competencies and then add company specific ones.
Ekaros 2y ago
Would this really be any different from certificates? And I don't think those are efficient in anything other than increasing billing rate or marketing for consulting. Such tests would be gamed in multiple ways. Or cheated. Or corrupted. Or info dumped...
- woleium 2y ago
  came here to say this.
jmclnx 2y ago
I doubt this will work. In my long experience, the type of questions that will be on this test will quickly morph into a "Marketing Type Test". In IT, changes happen so quickly, the tests will be out of date as soon as they are written. So as time goes on, you end up being quizzed about marketing instead of real IT terms. Plus you will need many tests, one for admins, support, development. As a final note, I can also see these tests end up being about methodologies like Agile instead of real Tech.
nine_zeros 2y ago
Because realistically, software engineering requires different skills from leetcode. The FAANG-style leetcode nonsense is deluding people into believing that selects for the right engineers. It doesn't. It is flawed and only works for factory-style companies to do a bare-minimum job while hiring.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  Well if I know how to do my job and I do it well, so must those recruiters, right? I'm sure the recruiters would agree. Conversely, if other people who think and are told they're doing their jobs well but we have evidence that they aren't, what does that say about me doing my programming thing?
  - nine_zeros 2y ago
    > so must those recruiters, right? I'm sure the recruiters would agree I don't understand. Are you suggesting that the corporation that sets these rules actually measures, and cares about refining these processes? Because they absolutely don't care about the quality of the process as long as the quantity targets are met.
blurbleblurble 2y ago
Software development is going the same way as "IT". You've been warned.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  What does this imply?
TradingPlaces 2y ago
Goodhart’s Law. When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric
wirelessguy 2y ago
1. You've just passed the cost to the unemployed developer. 2. Some of us do badly at standardised exams but are still highly competent and can prove it in other ways if given the chance. 3. If I fail an interview, I can reflect on where I did badly, study hard, and hopefully do better at the next interview days, weeks, or months later. A yearly standardised exam means I'm potentially unemployed for a whole year.
OutOfHere 2y ago
Management and those hiring don't want this because they like to silently discriminate in hiring using various personal biases. They will never admit it, but they do. With a correct standardized test, they lose this opportunity. Right now, the closest thing to such a test may be your StackOverflow or similar score.
- kcplate 2y ago
  As someone with a nearly 40 year career in tech with 30+ in a hiring and management level…I’ll gladly admit that a candidate’s personality and demeanor in an interview factors higher to me than technical ability. Is that a personal bias? Yep, but it’s a bias based on experience as to what works better on technical teams and worth the skill trad off. So I would gladly higher a friendly and open average skilled SWE than some aloof technical genius who is going to be likely regarded as an asshole to the rest of the team. If I was forced to higher based on test scores alone, I’d opt to quit that role…because that to me would be a recipe for failure.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    > some aloof technical genius who is going to be likely regarded as an asshole to the rest of the team. We can agree that no one wants a true ass, but I don't understand why some aloof technical genius needs to automatically be regarded in that way. It looks like the connection is in your mind. Moreover, it obvious to me that your goal is to use up VC funding, not to generate revenue for the company. An average SWE isn't going to do the special work required to generate revenue.
    - kcplate 2y ago
      >I don't understand why some aloof technical genius needs to automatically be regarded in that way. It looks like the connection is in your mind. …Or it could just be long experience. I have seen these kind folks sink teams and products. If my goal is to make what I am managing successful, why would I hire personality types that historically have proven to impede success in my experience? Believe me, the type I am referring to usually comes out in interviews. >Moreover, it obvious to me that your goal is to use up VC funding, not to generate revenue for the company. An average SWE isn't going to do the special work required to generate revenue. No, my job is to build successful teams and products. To do that i need to find compatible people to get the job done. An asshole rockstar might get me 75% there then prevent me from achieving the final 25% because they can’t work well with others. A cohesive team can get me to 100%. And…not all rockstars are assholes, so I choose to find the wheat and discard the chaff.

11 points by amichail 2y ago

Wouldn't this eliminate cheating (due to question reuse), shorten interviews, and save money?

Would it be offered any time I want to take it or is it only available to take once a year? If the latter why would I take it if I’m happy in my job? What happens if I don’t take it and get laid off later in the year? How someone talks during their technical job interview should be seen as equally important to the content of what they say during it. Will there be an oral component of your exam? Are there different exams for different languages/technologies and industries? How many exams do I have to take? Do people cheat on the yearly standardized exams in place (that are used, for university entrance, for example) now? Do hiring companies tend to believe that their needs are very similar to other hiring companies? How much faith would they put in such a standardized exam?

amichail 2y ago
The yearly standardized exams could be company-specific. So, if you want to apply for a software engineering position at Google, you would have to take the yearly Google standardized exam for software engineers.
- b20000 2y ago
  i am against companies taking over education, sorry this limits people’s mobility as they are then glued to a set of company specific skills
  - amichail 2y ago
    The exam could test for general abilities of importance to Google rather than Google specific technologies.
    - b20000 2y ago
      not sure if you realize how idiotic this sounds
      - paulcole 2y ago
        Narrator: He did not realize how idiotic this sounds.
  - j45 2y ago
    Universities are companies too. There is lots of education that can’t happen that companies have to fend for themselves and create materials to teach. 70% of learning is informal learning, outside of the classroom. The master/apprentice model has existed for so long for a reason. Learning the work is best done beside experience.
    - b20000 2y ago
      PRIVATE universities maybe. I graduated at a public university. companies need to educate you on the job. that will never change and it is unreasonable to demand you already have all skills ready to go. but that is where we are in the US…. it is also crazy that you need to copy paste job requirements into your CV role per role. a resume or CV is something you make ONCE. but i guess HR drones are too dumb to read so that is where we are.
      - j45 2y ago
        We pay one group to teach us and expect a different group to pay us and teach us? Reality for the many might be somewhere in the middle, off to one side.. there’s academic organizations with billions not pushing it off into organizations with millions to deliver what students paid tuition for.. relatively speaking? Companies don’t always have to hire graduates to educate them on the job. Profession and career development so important but a part of the work. It’s a skewed tech reality distortion field where tech companies compete by playing defence to tie up labour so others can’t grow… that results in those pesky mass layoffs. Repeatedly. Organizations very well may take over educating the workforce and leverage it like salarymen in Japan, low pay for lots of hours and stability. Not sure if I like that either. Or maybe they’ll just take the demands for remote work locally and let it be a global market. In the scenarios where a company is paying to educate you .. for free .. in addition to paying you a salary.. to learn? That you’ll become more valuable with, not necessarily give back or create value greater than what you’ve been paid, in addition to you paying an academic institution money to learn.. often under debt is.. sound? The gap between academic degrees and the workforce is generally increasing without cherry picking small groups as exceptions. Historically, Universities that taught you how to think didn’t have STEM. They consciously moved from liberal arts into into stem for the funding opportunities. Most of all I believe everyone has a right to learn and access opportunities to improve their life. The above doesn’t sound like it’s meant to speed that up. Happy to learn from other perspectives.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  Most companies wouldn’t want to spend the time making company specific exams so they would buy some off the shelf exams and we are back to Leetcode problem.
  - amichail 2y ago
    If a company can't afford to make its own exams, then it could still look at the results of a more general standardized yearly exam.
    - paulcole 2y ago
      Who administers the more general standardized yearly exam?
- paulcole 2y ago
  Oh sick so I could just ask my friends who took it earlier in the year for the answers?

OfficeChad 2y ago

This is idiotic.

j45 2y ago
Or perfect for anyone upset by it and not sharing why. Might be something to hide.

b20000 2y ago

you mean like go to university and get a real CS degree and have companies use that to give you a job? oh wait… this was supposed to be how it works but then some indian dude came along and made a platform and then some woman wrote a book and got in a HR decision making position in a FAANG and destroyed the value of everyone’s degrees by introducing coding interviews you can only pass if you grind them

amichail 2y ago
No, the exam would be standardized. There would be no need for a CS degree and you would need to take the exam even if you do have a CS degree.
- b20000 2y ago
  that is what university is for
  - throwaway48540 2y ago
    Most of the best developers I hired never went to a university.
    - j45 2y ago
      And if they did, there’s a strong element of being self-taught.
  - j45 2y ago
    No, it’s not. At all. But it’s what they’d like you to believe. Development teams benefit from both self taught and university taught developers. Self taught developers bring a different perspective.

thesuperbigfrog 2y ago

Like certifications (A+, Linux+, RHCE, RHCSA, CISSP, etc.), but specifically for software developers? Sounds like a business opportunity: https://education.oracle.com/java-certification-benefits/certstep https://education.oracle.com/java-certification-benefits/cer... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/browse/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/browse/ https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-developer-associate/ https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-developer-ass... "Save money"? This would make money. Just think how much businesses would pay to keep their employees' credentials current! You could also charge exorbitant fees for training, books, and videos people would use to prepare for the exams. Maybe you could even setup a school business built on teaching people stuff for all the exams and then give them an "everything" certificate after they took all the exams the school had? Oh, wait.

amichail 2y ago
If that worked, why would tech companies still have in-depth technical interviews?
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Most interview processes are for making decision-makers feel better, not for finding the best candidate. Very few companies use interviews with a theoretical basis, let alone an evidential basis.
  - drewcoo 2y ago
    And most decisions of any kind are made emotionally, then explained with post hoc rationalizations. To magically seem logical and objective, you can withhold your decision until you've explained the rationalizations. Consider also the typical engineering "which thing should we buy" matrix, which is often thinly masked biases of the author and arguing points against other views from the team. Consider also the rationalizations in design docs ("why we should make it like this") that barely seem to cover up the designer's favorite methods and tools that are actually driving things. We spend a lot of time/energy trying to seem logical when we're fundamentally not.

giantg2 2y ago

This is perhaps even worse than the state of interviews today. The exams mean very little. They are easy to study for and tell almost nothing about a candidates performance, just knowledge. If we wanted to go this route, we'd be using GPAs to differentiate candidates, but that rarely seems to be a factor today.

amichail 2y ago
The standardized exam could include computer programming under time pressure.
- throwaway48540 2y ago
  When I'm doing an interview, I really don't care much about the code being written; I don't even care if it runs, is correct on some percentage/point scale or whatever else like that. I care about how they're thinking about it, how they react to my hints, how they act when they are stuck, if they ask for help or not, if they try to cover up what they don't know or that they made a mistake or are open and honest about it and treat it as an opportunity to learn, etc. A standardized exam result won't give me any of this information/experience. I'm going to be especially suspicious with people who have a perfect score, experience has shown me that the best engineers often (not always) don't have great academic results, while those who had perfect results often can't function well independently in a real-world unstructured environment.
  - amichail 2y ago
    You don't care about ranking in the International Olympiad in Informatics?
    - throwaway48540 2y ago
      Interesting curiosity, but it says nothing about their ability to function in a real world software engineering organization - so we're going to be coding on the interview anyways. The interview is really not just about the coding skill itself, that's actually the much less important part of it.

sircastor 2y ago

I feel like the answer is that people like their gate-keeping. There are a lot of programmers who like being part of a special club and want to manage who gets in. It’s couched behind meritocracy, but I think it can be boiled down to gate-keeping.

keiferski 2y ago

Same reason that Ivy League admissions aren’t based on anything that could be considered objective. The gatekeepers don’t want them to be.

palata 2y ago

I see two kinds of technical job interviews: the FAANG style and the rest. Let's start with the latter: the problem is that not every company wants exactly the same developer profile. Acing a standardized exam means that you are really good at what the exam is testing. But because you excel at leetcode interviews really does not mean that you are the best fit for most companies in the world. Maybe this company will want somebody with experience in a specific framework ("we have a Qt mobile app", "we work with Laravel", "we write firmwares", ...), that company will want something with domain knowledge ("we need someone who understands the medical domain", "we need someone who understands maritime navigation", ...). You can't standardize that. For the small parts you could standardize, it exists: a CS degree, "5 years experience as a dev", etc. For the former, it seems to me that it is already pretty much standardized. When you interview for FAANG companies, you need to read a lot about the interview process and prepare it like you would prepare an exam. If you are super ready for the interview at Meta, you are also super ready for Google. It is some kind of standard already. Maybe the FAANGs could team together to share the exams, but the economy would be marginal (otherwise they would have done it).

j45 2y ago

Skills and competency assessments are a great idea. One piece is naming sure the assessments and competency assessors have competency. You could get reasonably far with a core set of skills and competencies and then add company specific ones.

Ekaros 2y ago

Would this really be any different from certificates? And I don't think those are efficient in anything other than increasing billing rate or marketing for consulting. Such tests would be gamed in multiple ways. Or cheated. Or corrupted. Or info dumped...

woleium 2y ago
came here to say this.

jmclnx 2y ago

I doubt this will work. In my long experience, the type of questions that will be on this test will quickly morph into a "Marketing Type Test". In IT, changes happen so quickly, the tests will be out of date as soon as they are written. So as time goes on, you end up being quizzed about marketing instead of real IT terms. Plus you will need many tests, one for admins, support, development. As a final note, I can also see these tests end up being about methodologies like Agile instead of real Tech.

nine_zeros 2y ago

Because realistically, software engineering requires different skills from leetcode. The FAANG-style leetcode nonsense is deluding people into believing that selects for the right engineers. It doesn't. It is flawed and only works for factory-style companies to do a bare-minimum job while hiring.

drewcoo 2y ago
Well if I know how to do my job and I do it well, so must those recruiters, right? I'm sure the recruiters would agree. Conversely, if other people who think and are told they're doing their jobs well but we have evidence that they aren't, what does that say about me doing my programming thing?
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  > so must those recruiters, right? I'm sure the recruiters would agree I don't understand. Are you suggesting that the corporation that sets these rules actually measures, and cares about refining these processes? Because they absolutely don't care about the quality of the process as long as the quantity targets are met.

blurbleblurble 2y ago

Software development is going the same way as "IT". You've been warned.

OutOfHere 2y ago
What does this imply?

TradingPlaces 2y ago

Goodhart’s Law. When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric

wirelessguy 2y ago

1. You've just passed the cost to the unemployed developer. 2. Some of us do badly at standardised exams but are still highly competent and can prove it in other ways if given the chance. 3. If I fail an interview, I can reflect on where I did badly, study hard, and hopefully do better at the next interview days, weeks, or months later. A yearly standardised exam means I'm potentially unemployed for a whole year.

OutOfHere 2y ago

Management and those hiring don't want this because they like to silently discriminate in hiring using various personal biases. They will never admit it, but they do. With a correct standardized test, they lose this opportunity. Right now, the closest thing to such a test may be your StackOverflow or similar score.

kcplate 2y ago
As someone with a nearly 40 year career in tech with 30+ in a hiring and management level…I’ll gladly admit that a candidate’s personality and demeanor in an interview factors higher to me than technical ability. Is that a personal bias? Yep, but it’s a bias based on experience as to what works better on technical teams and worth the skill trad off. So I would gladly higher a friendly and open average skilled SWE than some aloof technical genius who is going to be likely regarded as an asshole to the rest of the team. If I was forced to higher based on test scores alone, I’d opt to quit that role…because that to me would be a recipe for failure.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  > some aloof technical genius who is going to be likely regarded as an asshole to the rest of the team. We can agree that no one wants a true ass, but I don't understand why some aloof technical genius needs to automatically be regarded in that way. It looks like the connection is in your mind. Moreover, it obvious to me that your goal is to use up VC funding, not to generate revenue for the company. An average SWE isn't going to do the special work required to generate revenue.
  - kcplate 2y ago
    >I don't understand why some aloof technical genius needs to automatically be regarded in that way. It looks like the connection is in your mind. …Or it could just be long experience. I have seen these kind folks sink teams and products. If my goal is to make what I am managing successful, why would I hire personality types that historically have proven to impede success in my experience? Believe me, the type I am referring to usually comes out in interviews. >Moreover, it obvious to me that your goal is to use up VC funding, not to generate revenue for the company. An average SWE isn't going to do the special work required to generate revenue. No, my job is to build successful teams and products. To do that i need to find compatible people to get the job done. An asshole rockstar might get me 75% there then prevent me from achieving the final 25% because they can’t work well with others. A cohesive team can get me to 100%. And…not all rockstars are assholes, so I choose to find the wheat and discard the chaff.