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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?

Implementing an FDE hiring program? See my FDE Advisory Materials for interview templates, scorecards, and detailed process guides.

Criticality and Engagement

Hiring is hard. It's difficult to figure out what makes a good hire.

If nothing else I have found these two qualities to be the most important in a hire:

  1. Critical thinking
  2. Engagement

I have often rejected candidates who were technically strong but lacked these two qualities.

Critical Thinking

"The day you don't feel comfortable disagreeing with me is the day we have lost our culture" - Shyam Sankar

Shyam said this in one of the all hands at Palantir and it has stuck with me since then.

You want to hire people who are not afraid to disagree with you. You want to hire people who will challenge you. Independent thinkers is what makes a company.

Engagement

Anyone who is genuinely interested in the work will naturally be a high performer. They will care about getting it right. It aligns incentives.

This attitude is infectious, it is additive. It will rub off on the rest of the team.

Conclusion

Of course there are other qualities that are important, and I have written about them in the past. But these two, to some degree are "must haves". Be on the lookout for them.

Implementing an FDE hiring program? See my FDE Advisory Materials for interview templates, scorecards, and detailed process guides.

Hiring for a mission-driven early-stage startup

I have recently had the privilege of working with the team at Comand AI. Comand is a mission-driven startup that is building a platform to bolster NATO and NATO-aligned countries' defense capabilities by building products that help make operations more efficient and effective.

The company is at a very early stage and are currently sprinting towards finding product-market fit. At the same time they have a very clear mission and vision, and have seen early signs of traction in the market. This means as they continue to gather user feedback and iterate on their product, they need to build a team that can move quickly and adapt to the changing needs of their customers.

The Challenge

The founding team at Comand AI is really strong on the technical side. It is exactly the kind of team you would expect to see at a mission-driven startup - highly motivated, technically strong, and deeply passionate about the problem they are solving. However, they needed help in building out the team further. How do you identify the traits that would make someone successful in a mission-driven startup? How do you build a hiring process that can help you identify these traits?

At the pre-product-market-fit stage you generally want people who have spikes in at least one of the following two areas:

  1. Highly Creative: They need to be someone who can explore the product space and come up with innovative solutions.
  2. Strong Execution: They need to be someone who can take a vague idea and turn it into a product really quickly.

You either need someone who can chart out uncharted territories and come up with innovative ideas, or someone who can quickly build a prototype and test it out with users. Ideally both.

Separately, you need to be mindful of the mission-driven aspect of the company. You need people who are deeply passionate about the problem you are solving, and who are willing to go the extra mile to make sure you succeed. And you need to think about the kind of culture you want to build. You want people who are collaborative, who are willing to take ownership of the outcome, and who are able to work effectively with others.

Designing a hiring process that can help identify these traits is crucial to building a team that can help you achieve your mission.

The Process

I started by understanding the current team makeup, their values, and the business goals they were trying to achieve. This was mapped to the hiring goals for the next 6 months. I also did some ground work by shadowing a few interviews and understanding the current process. This revealed the different interviewing styles, their preferences, the kind of questions they were asking, and the synthesis process.

One of the main gaps I noticed was something I have written about before - being ok with the unfairness of interviews. The team has high empathy for the candidates, and at times this meant they were not making the hard decisions that were needed. An empathetic interviewer is a good thing - being empathetic helps build a genuine connection with the candidate, but while synthesising the feedback, it is important to be objective. This is especially important when evaluating candidates who are good, but not great. At such an early stage, you want to hire great people.

I also worked with the internal recruiting lead to design a process that would help identify the traits we were looking for. This included:

  • A screening call with the internal officer and me to understand the candidate's motivations and values.
  • (Optional) Another domain-specific call with the technical lead to understand the candidate's technical capabilities.
  • Coding assessment.
  • Onsite interviews that included a mix of technical and behavioural interviews.
  • A founder interview to understand the candidate's alignment with the mission and vision of the company.

The first screening call was designed to protect the team's time and ensure that only candidates who were deeply aligned with the mission and vision of the company were brought onsite.

We are still in the process of iterating on the process, but the early signs are promising. The team is excited about the candidates they are seeing, and the candidates are excited about the opportunity to work at Comand AI. As we get more reps under our belt, we hope to add more rigor and accountability by introducing hiring theses to have a historical record of why we made the decisions we did, as well as to have an understanding of how and where to staff new hires.

Looking Forward

As Comand AI continues to grow, they will need to continue to iterate on their hiring process. They will need to think about how to scale the process, how to ensure that the process is fair and unbiased, and how to ensure that they are hiring the right people for the right roles. And all of this without losing sight of the mission and vision of the company. But the passion and drive of the founding team was apparent since the beginning, and I am confident that they will be able to build a team that can help them achieve their goals.

Get in touch if you would like to work at Comand AI, or if you would like to know more about the hiring process we are building. I am always happy to chat about hiring, startups, and everything in between. If you are currently in the process of hiring for your startup, and would like some help, feel free to reach out to me at me@anjor.xyz.

Implementing an FDE hiring program? See my FDE Advisory Materials for interview templates, scorecards, and detailed process guides.

A Hiring Framework for a New Kind of Services Company

These past couple of weeks I have been working closely with the team at Northslope Technologies on designing a hiring framework.

The Challenge

Founded by former Palantirians, Northslope is a professional services company that provides premium Foundry & AIP development services. This shape of the company is unique in that it is a professional services company that has a product component, and still relies on elite technical talent to deliver services. This makes hiring a unique challenge.

On one hand you can't hire in the same way as you would for a consulting company. You want to hire people who will take ownership of the outcome, and not just be a pair of hands. On the other hand, you can't hire in the same way as you would for a product company. While building reusable product components is important for efficiency and scalability, the primary focus remains on delivering high-impact client outcomes, on short timeframes.

This means we need people who can balance both mindsets - who can leverage Foundry's capabilities to deliver client solutions efficiently, while also identifying opportunities to build reusable components that amplify our impact across multiple engagements.

The Framework

Given this unique challenge, we have been working on a hiring framework that is designed to identify and attract the right kind of talent. It starts with two key questions:

  1. Are they smart?
  2. Do they want to win?

In some sense this is all you need to know about a candidate. If they are smart, they will learn and grow quickly - both on the technical side and on the business side. They will be creative, resourceful, and able to solve complex problems. If they have a desire to win, they will be able to deliver high-impact client solutions, build reusable product components, and help grow the business. They will be able to work effectively with clients, understand their needs, and deliver solutions that exceed their expectations.

This is obviously an oversimplification. If this is all we had on our hiring scorecard we would be missing a lot of important details. It also is highly subjective and prone to bias. But it is a useful starting point. Let's break it down further.

What Does It Mean to Be Smart?

  • Problem Solving: Are they analytical? Do they demonstrate empirical, evidence-based thinking? Can they break down complex problems into simpler components?
  • Creativity: Are they able to think outside the box? Can they come up with innovative solutions to problems?
  • Execution: Are they able to build a working solution? Can they take an idea from concept to reality?
  • Customer Focus: Are they able to understand the needs of the client? Can they deliver solutions that meet or exceed their expectations?

What Does It Mean to Be Able to Win?

  • Getting Things Done (GTD): Are they able to deliver results? Can they execute on their ideas and deliver high-impact solutions?
  • Ownership: Are they able to take ownership of the outcome? Can they drive projects to completion and take responsibility for the results? Do they demonstrate a commitment to excellence?
  • Low Ego: Are they able to work effectively with others? Can they collaborate with clients and team members to deliver solutions that meet everyone's needs?
  • Criticality: Are they able to identify opportunities for improvement? Can they see the big picture and understand how their work fits into the larger context?
  • Grit: Are they able to persevere in the face of challenges? Can they overcome obstacles and setbacks to achieve their goals?
  • High Chaos Tolerance: Are they able to thrive in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment? Can they adapt to changing circumstances and deliver results under tight deadlines?

The Process

We have developed an interview process that reflects these dimensions while remaining adaptable and evolving. Currently, it centers around three core components:

  1. An open-ended problem decomposition interview, where candidates work through an intentionally ambiguous challenge. This helps us evaluate their analytical thinking, creativity, and ability to navigate uncertainty - critical skills for client-facing work.

  2. A technical analysis and building exercise that assesses not just technical capability, but how candidates approach building solutions in practice.

  3. A behavioral interview that explores past experiences and approaches to challenges, helping us understand how candidates embody traits like ownership and grit in real-world situations.

Looking Forward

But perhaps more important than the specific format is our commitment to continuous refinement of the process itself. We regularly evaluate how well these interviews predict success in the role and adjust accordingly. This mirrors our broader approach at Northslope - we're building something new in the professional services space, and that requires being thoughtful and deliberate about every aspect of how we operate, including how we grow our team.

Hiring Theses

Hiring exceptional candidates is hard. In previous posts I have written about how one might go about identifying and interviewing strong candidates consistently.

In this post I would like to share a technique at the final stage of the hiring process that I have seen used at Palantir and Protocol Labs, and have found to be quite effective - namely, the hiring thesis.

What is a Hiring Thesis?

A hiring thesis is a comprehensive document prepared by the hiring manager after making a decision to hire a candidate. It serves as a summary of why they chose this particular individual, highlighting their strengths and qualities that make them an ideal fit for the company.

This is not just a list of their strengths and weaknesses but a nuanced and thoughtful document.

Key components of a good Hiring Thesis

  • What projects or workstreams will this candidate have an outsized impact on? And what specific qualities will make that happen?
  • What is this candidate's ceiling? Is that an acceptable level and why?
  • What is this candidate's kryptonite? What projects/people should this candidate absolutely not work on/with?
  • What is the best case scenario?
  • What is the worst case scenario? How might we mitigate this?
  • Any advice for managers about what to look out for to help this person succeed?

Why is a Hiring Thesis important?

It might seem like a lot of overhead to write this document for every hire, however, it is a useful exercise for multiple reasons.

  • It increases confidence in the hiring decision by forcing you to consider multiple different scenarios
  • It provides as a guide for their manager for things to watch out for, staffing decisions etc.
  • It builds up a knowledge asset for the company and helps calibrate future interviewers/hiring managers.
  • Parts of the hiring thesis could also be used as a sell chat for the candidate!

Conclusion

The hiring thesis is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance your hiring process and set new team members up for success. By taking the time to articulate your thoughts and expectations for each new hire, you create a valuable resource that benefits not just the individual, but the entire organization.

Implementing a hiring thesis process may require some initial effort, but the long-term benefits far outweigh the investment. It promotes more thoughtful decision-making, provides a roadmap for employee development, and contributes to a culture of intentional growth within your company.

Ultimately, the hiring thesis is more than just a document—it's a commitment to nurturing talent and fostering an environment where both individuals and the company can thrive. By adopting this approach, you're not just filling positions; you're strategically building the future of your organization, one carefully considered hire at a time.

Get in touch by emailing me@anjor.xyz if you are an early stage startup looking to improve your hiring process.

I've turned this into a template: Hiring Thesis Template (see the Hiring Manager section).

Implementing an FDE hiring program? See my FDE Advisory Materials for interview templates, scorecards, and detailed process guides.

How did Palantir hire so well?

I have written before about the Forward Deployed Engineer profile, and how hiring for that profile can be highly impactful for a company -- Palantir being a great example. In that blog post I also wrote a bit about how to hire FDEs. But honestly, re-reading that post I realised that the framework I wrote down though helpful to orient, does not give the means to assess whether or not your hiring is going well.

One Hiring Manager

That got me thinking -- how did Palantir do it so well? What was the secret? Unfortunately, the answer is not an easy one. Palantir did things that do not scale for their hiring. During the time I interviewed there, there was 1 hiring manager for all engineering hires. This one individual was responsible for:

  • Gathering feedback from all the on-site interviews a candidate has been through: 3 per candidate.
  • Based on the synthesised feedback, design a bespoke hiring manager interview for the candidate that would gather signal that was missed during the on-site interviews.
  • After the interview, if decided to hire the candidate, write a thorough hiring thesis for the candidate.

These were just the actual interviewing responsibilities. This same hiring manager was also the lead for the whole recruiting machinery:

  • Working with recruiters to put together top of the funnel strategy.
  • Working with leadership and resourcing to understand headcount and/or specific geographical/profile needs.
  • Designing and running the internship program.
  • And most importantly recruit and calibrate new interviewers.

Conclusion

By centralising the hiring function there was immense quality control over the hiring. But as you can imagine, it is hard work and can result in the individual burning out.

Like any other aspect of building a startup, this is a tradeoff. At early stage companies I do recommend founders and/or founding team to be involved in hiring as much as possible. You know your company and its culture better than anyone else. As you scale, if you can find an individual who is willing to take on the hiring function and keep it centralised as much as possible that is ideal for maintaining high quality bar.

Need Help with Your Hiring Strategy?

If you're looking to improve your company's hiring process, I can help. I offer:

  • Tailored hiring strategy development
  • Interviewer training and calibration
  • Guidance on building a hiring function

Whether you're a startup founder or an HR leader in a growing company, let's discuss how to elevate your hiring to the next level. Contact me for a free consultation.

I've documented this centralized hiring approach in my FDE Hiring & Talent Strategy guide.

Implementing an FDE hiring program? See my FDE Advisory Materials for interview templates, scorecards, and detailed process guides.

Taking bets on candidates

Hiring for early stage companies is hard. You are competing for strong talent against a ton of other companies. As a founder or a hiring manager, your ability to identify candidates to take a bet on can be an asset.

I was a bet candidate

I was a bet hire at Palantir. I didn't have a standard background - since the age of 13 I had always wanted to study Physics and no one could have convinced me otherwise. Because of this I didn't even consider studying anything else. I learnt programming to simulate physics systems, and to analyse and visualise the simulation data. I did not work on side projects or build things for fun. I had done no internships. I had zero experience in tech before joining Palantir.

I still remember my interviews. I could tell that I didn't know enough, but I could also tell that I enjoyed engaging with the questions I was being asked, and I think my genuine interest and engagement with the problems came through.

I was lucky that the hiring manager could see my potential and decided to take a bet on me. Or maybe it had nothing to do with luck, and this was just a reflection of the high-trust high-autonomy culture at Palantir.

Relate to the candidate

Going back to the essentials from the FDE hiring post - those qualities have nothing to do with the tactical specifics of what the candidate knows, and everything to do with who they are as a person. During the interview, you need to relate to the candidate, get to know them as a person and only then you may find out what makes them tick. What are their spikes and what are their kryptonites.

If they are engaged and demonstrate first-principles understanding of the problem, they are probably going to be successful. On the other hand, if they are not engaged and keep trying to reverse-guess what you want to hear from them, maybe not.

An example of a good interview

There is this one interview I shadowed at Palantir that has stuck with me as a master-class in interviewing. The candidate was super passive and giving monosyllabic answers. It was really hard to break through. The interviewer kept asking different questions about their background persistently, trying to get to a topic they would enjoy talking about. Eventually, the interviewer succeeded - the candidate opened up when talking about their interest in foreign films and how that relates to them learning new languages.

It was an absolutely incredible interview. It took a lot of effort but the interviewer finally did manage to relate to the candidate, and understood a bit more about how they could be successful.

Don't shy away from going off-road

The key takeaway is to get to know the candidate. They are a person. They are going to have things that engage them, and things they struggle with. Guide the interview to a place where you find common ground to help the candidate open up. Don't worry about the tactical specifics of what you want to hear from them. Take copious notes or use a tool like Metaview1 and you can always synthesise later.

To conclude

Taking bets on candidates can be a powerful strategy for early-stage companies looking to build exceptional teams. By focusing on a candidate's potential, engagement, and personal qualities rather than just their technical skills or traditional qualifications, you can uncover hidden gems that others might overlook. Remember, the goal is to identify individuals who can grow with your company and contribute meaningfully to its success. As you interview, be willing to go off-script, relate to the candidate on a personal level, and look for signs of genuine interest and problem-solving ability. These "bet candidates" often bring fresh perspectives and a strong drive to succeed, potentially becoming some of your most valuable team members.

Get in touch if you would like to discuss this topic further, or if you think I could help with your hiring process.

Implementing an FDE hiring program? See my FDE Advisory Materials for interview templates, scorecards, and detailed process guides.

  1. I know a cofounder of Metaview personally, but this post was not sponsored by them in any way. Nor do I know if they agree with the thoughts in this post. I genuinely think it's a great product! ↩