Hiring and The Sixth Sense of Experience

The anecdote is a bit unfortunate (it's easy to confidently declare that someone is incompetent after they've made a huge mistake), but the point is basically valid: a small percentage of people have good taste that should be trusted above all else.

The problem is that most people don't have good taste, and those people nearly always have an inflated estimation of their own discriminatory ability. So at the end of the day, knowing that some teeny-tiny percentage of people is exceptionally gifted with good taste doesn't really help you much, because you can't reliably select for them in a group environment. And in my experience, the people with bad taste are almost certain to dominate any discussion, just by virtue of their overwhelming number.

I think the real lesson here is just one of those sad facts of life: if you work on a team that you haven't hand-selected, some of the people you work with are going to seem (or be) incompetent. Traditionally unspoken corollary: even if you selected the team, you might be incompetent.

I think half the people meeting with him giving him a "no-hire" should have been a big flag. One of the takeaways should be that if half you team doesn't want to hire someone, you should have the guts to tell the person they didn't get the job.

I've seen many programmer interview processes where only half the interviewers want to hire, but everyone found the person "likable", so there was trouble getting to the necessary "no-hire". I'm not sure of this case's specifics are like that, but one of the first things I learned to do in interviewing is how to say "no-hire" to cool, interesting, nice, marginally-competent people.

This "sixth sense" exists to some extent, but it's a little dangerous to believe in it because a lot people will pretend to have it, meaning that you'll need a sixth sense about sixth senses in order to actually rely on it without getting duped.

If a function is critical to your company, then you or a cofounder need to understand it a lot better than the guy who asked about "lines of code".

I don't understand how this story is a good anecdote for what this guy is trying to say ie, that some people have a sixth sense about hiring

How is it sixth sense that he fired a guy who obviously made such a grave mistake ?!

If the guy was fired before the mistake and he went to a new company where he committed a big mistake, then that would have better suited what he was trying to convey !

Obviously he shouldn't make up stories, but the one he uses doesn't suit the message

> he accidentally committed a horrible piece of code that worked great on the staging server for a few days, but when it was auto-updated to the production hardware devices, it broke them all

this anecdote says more about their pipeline than some random engineer. it shouldn't be possible for code to reach customers without multiple engineers becoming accountable for it via reviews.

The point is valid, but what's the takeaway here? You're a two-man shop with a growing product and you desperately need another coder, a designer and a tester. Starting browsing for CEOs probably isn't the best path in this situation.

"After arguing for thirty minutes about about everyone’s reasoning..." - typo there.