alt Hacker NewsGreat write-up!
One of my best hires ever was a VR dev we brought in as an intern. He became the backbone of our Unity/Unreal work, including some genuinely gnarly low-level haptics integration into the physics engine. On paper he didn’t look like the “obvious” pick: he’d majored in English Literature, largely because his (UK) school’s CS track was taught in a way that turned him off (they were still doing Fortran…). But he could build.
After our startup, Improbable scooped him up on the strength of that very real, shippable experience, and he’s now a senior SWE at Epic, doing exactly what he loves.
One practical thing that’s helped me find these kinds of people in startup interviews: optimize for calm + realism. My #1 goal is to get the candidate relaxed enough that I can see how they actually think and code. I often ask them to bring any public code they’ve written and we walk through it together. It’s a great way to surface judgment, taste, and real ownership that don’t show up on a resume.
It's interesting that most of us have that story of someone who didn't pattern-match and yet ended up being absolutely stellar. Makes you wonder just how much latent talent is out there not being given the chance for one reason or another. Hope this article reminds people to dig beneath the surface a little more.
And yes, many candidates struggle with performing under the totally unnatural pressure of an interview, so you can cater to them with something like the github project review. Then you end up potentially filtering out people without a rich body of work that can be easily reviewed, which is a trade-off. Actually something I've been meaning to write about, I always say that there's no way to please everybody with an interview funnel. Someone perfectly fine will be filtered out, or turned off, by any of the approaches you choose.
You just need to choose which false negatives you will be ok with.