David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

And when you can evaluate the quality of work products, you can very quickly tell who's full of shit and who will actually take you to Mars.

And you can fire the people who's full of shit and you can bet on the people who'll get us to Mars.

That capacity to directly evaluate the competency of individuals

is actually a little bit rare.

It's not widely distributed among managers, hiring managers.

It's not something you can easily delegate to people who are not very skilled at the work itself.

And Elon obviously knows a lot about a lot and he can smell who knows stuff for real.

And is this at our tiny scale, something I've tried to do in the same order where when we hire programmers, for example,

It's going to be interesting now with AI as a new challenge.

But up until this point, the main pivot point for getting hired was not your resume, was not the schooling you've had, was not your grades, was not your pedigree.

It was how well you did on two things.

A, your cover letter, because I can only work with people remotely if they're good writers.

So if you can't pen a proper cover letter and can't bother to put in the effort to write it specifically for us, you're out.

Two, you have to be able to program really well to the degree that I can look at your code and go like, yeah, I want to work with that person.

Not only I want to work with that person, I want to work on that person's code when I have to see it again in five years to fix some damn bug.

So we're going to give you a programming test.

That simulates the way we work for real.

And we're going to see how you do.

And I've been surprised time and again where I thought for sure this candidate is a shoo-in.

They sound just right.