#1
me: the candidate seemed pretty good, even if he made some mistakes.
CEO: a false negative is better than a false positive! Better to reject and err on the side of caution!
...later
CEO: we can't find people! There's a shortage! It's a crisis!
#2
CEO: we only hire the best, smartest people in the world!
me: OK I found one! He wants a high salary.
CEO: welllll, average market salary is only $, but since "we're a startup" we can't even do that....
Everyone says that. So everyone is really smart. So it doesn't matter.
More accurately: "We lost another one to Apple... because they pay tip top of the market salaries."
If I see one more "kitchen" where everything is either fried, made of corn, or both....
It's the manager's job to make sure there is slack in production; that there are resources available for emergency situations, and that there is enough redundancy built into the production team that if somebody gets sick or somehow can't work a normal workload, somebody else can pick it up. If a crunch situation is unavoidable, as a manager, I would be deeply apologetic and appreciative of my employees' sacrifice, while frantically searching for a solution to ease the burden. If I can't bring in help, I need to adjust the scope or push back on the deadline. Plain and simple.
No, no, no, a thousand times no. Software isn't an assembly line. It's not piece work. Adding more people to a late project only makes it later, as the existing dev team has to work to bring the new hires (even if they're experienced developers, they're still new to the project) up to speed. Adding more resources to a late project, without accounting for a period of reduced productivity is the absolute worst thing management can do. I have literally seen projects go from, "Well, it's borderline, but we can deliver if we work weekends," to, "There is no way we can do this by the delivery date," because management decided to add two new developers to the team.
The worst thing is, Fred Brooks published a book talking about this phenomenon in the '70s: The Mythical Man Month. And somehow, the lesson still hasn't sunk in.
A year is a long time to wait in startup time.
But some people have decided -- for a number of understandable reasons -- that Tor is actually a good thing to help with.
Everyone's got different ideas of worthwhile uses of their time. Some people love contributing to something; others won't spend 5 minutes on it. It has to do with desire, goals, values, and passion, rather than strictly mathematical aptitude, as you suggested.
More importantly, that even if you beat the odds and the company is a smashing success, 0.5% over four years is likely worth less money than the cash/stock bonuses major tech companies are handing out anyways, especially accounting for liquidation preferences and ratchets.
The big lie in startup equity isn't how unlikely they are to succeed, it's how little you would walk away with even if they do.
And a lot of people fail to identify the difference.
I said no and gave reassurances, they didn't hire me, the guy who did the peer-programming part of the interview (stage 4) me changed his LinkedIn to "Apple" about a week later.
They've taken down that ad and reposted it about a month later three times since then.
I'm not even involved with hiring, and I hear this so often it makes me hurt. Also, I'd add:
CEO: drives off in over-priced car to fly to Europe on the company dime for "business"
Team lead at 9pm on Saturday: "Hey, where's the CEO? We need him to review a few things, he wanted sign-off before we got too far."
VP Product: "He's in Vale all weekend with his family, skiing. He's off the grid until late Sunday night."
"We hire extraordinarily productive people, who are very good at interviewing and are also ready to work for peanuts. We can't seem to find any, there is a crisis in this market"
CEO: "Although he was a strong candidate, he was more engineering focused than what we need right now. We need a Product focused person."