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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Assholes

I've seen this pattern play out dozens of times. The brilliant engineer who tears apart your architecture in design reviews. The physics Nobel laureate who's a complete dick but moves research forward. The Palantir FDE who makes people uncomfortable but somehow always ships.

They're assholes. And they get results.

So there's this tempting logic: Maybe we need to hire more of them?

A friend at a startup just told me something interesting. "Everyone here is so humble," she said. Then she paused. "Maybe too humble. Nobody fights for their ideas. Sometimes it feels we're not ambitious enough"

We've created a false choice:

Option A: Hire nice, humble people → Get a room full of diffidence

Option B: Tolerate brilliant assholes → Get results but destroy morale

Is this a true dichotomy?

Were the assholes effective because they were assholes? Or despite being assholes?

What if the causality is backwards?

They had conviction. They were direct. They were ambitious. They pushed back on bad ideas.

They also happened to be assholes.

We saw correlation and assumed causation. We thought the cruelty was necessary for the conviction.

Let me give you a counter-example.

Paul Mustiere spent 8 years at Palantir. I was his mentor when he interned. A few months ago, he joined Comand AI as Head of Engineering.

Paul is one of the highest-agency people I've ever worked with. He gets things done. He'll challenge your technical approach. He'll push back on bad ideas. He sets ambitious visions and rallies teams around them.

He's also genuinely humble. Low ego. Makes people around him better.

You don't have to choose between conviction and decency. Paul is living proof.

But even if you believe tolerating assholes gets short-term results, what's the actual cost?

The good people who quietly leave. The collaborative culture you never build. The institutional knowledge that walks out the door. The junior engineers who learn that being right matters more than being decent.

You're not being pragmatic by ignoring human cost. You're taking on technical debt in your culture. And like all technical debt, it compounds.

So here's the reframe:

Stop asking: "Should we hire assholes?"

Start asking: "How do we hire for conviction, directness, and ambition without hiring for cruelty, ego, and disrespect?"

Because these are separate traits.

You can have the physicist who challenges every assumption AND treats grad students with respect.

You can have the engineer who rewrites your architecture AND makes you feel good about the collaboration.

You can have the leader who sets an ambitious vision AND brings people along.

The framework for hiring:

Must-haves:

  • High conviction (will fight for what they believe)
  • Intellectual honesty (will change their mind when wrong)
  • Directness (will tell you the truth)
  • Ambition (wants to build something great)

Deal-breakers:

  • Making it personal
  • Cruelty for cruelty's sake
  • Ego-driven (caring more about being right than finding truth)
  • Disrespecting people even while disagreeing with ideas

In an interview, this looks like:

  • Someone who challenges your technical approach → good signal

  • Someone who challenges it and makes you feel stupid → red flag

  • Someone who says "I think you're wrong about this architecture" → high conviction

  • Someone who says "I can't believe you'd even consider that approach" → asshole

The unreasonable effectiveness of hiring assholes? It's a myth.

What's actually effective is hiring people with conviction.

Some of them happen to be assholes. That's not the part that makes them effective. That's the part that will eventually destroy your company.

Don't confuse the two.

What's your experience? Have you seen companies successfully separate conviction from toxicity? Or is this just naive optimism?