The Last Technical Interview

Steve announces early that he's about to "pull a Kitchen Confidential" on the tech-assessment business, and the essay delivers on the kitchen access: statistics Google gathered and never published internally, interviewers handing the same candidate a confident "strong hire" and a flat no, scores that predicted nothing once people were on the job, star performers who failed the loop four or five times before getting in. The best evidence for the alternative is autobiographical. Geoworks, Steve's first employer, made every candidate work a paid six-month co-op before deciding, hired three of the eight in his 1992 class, and built a bench so strong that when Amazon acqui-hired the office in 1999, its leaders were still calling it — as recently as two weeks before this was published — the strongest group of engineers they ever brought in.

The prescription is deliberately unfinished, and Steve predicts in the fourth paragraph that readers will come back to yell at him about it. He insists the diagnosis is the important part, promises "no silver bullet," and confesses near the end that he cut a more concrete solution, partly for space and partly because Opus 4.8, the AI model reviewing his drafts, was "way too goddamn critical of everything all the time." So the hard questions stay open: who mints the portable work records, and what keeps companies grading them honestly, when by his own admission inflated stamps just reinvent LinkedIn endorsements. He asks that the campfire be treated as a sketch, and says outright that nudging the Overton window is the whole ambition.