Shawn Wang: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, so the P 99 engineer was just a term that we started using internally to talk about candidates and talk about how we wanted to build the company. And you know, like everyone else is, like we want a talent dense company. And I think that’s almost become trite at this point. What I credit the cursor founders a lot with is that they just arrived there from first principles of like, we just need a talent dense, um, talent dense team. And I think I’ve seen some teams that weren’t talent dense and like seemed a counterfactual run, which if you’ve run in been in a large company, you will just see that like it’s just logically will happen at a large company. Um, and so that was super important to me and Justine and it’s very difficult to maintain. And so we just needed, we needed wording for it. And so I have a document called Traits of the P 99 Engineer, and it’s a bullet point list. And I look at that list after every single interview that I do, and in every single recap that we do and every recap we end with. End with, um, some version of I’m gonna reject this candidate completely regardless of what the discourse was, because I wanna see people fight for this person because the default should not be, we’re gonna hire this person. The default should be, we’re definitely not hiring this person. And you know, if everyone was like, ah, maybe throw a punch, then this is not the right. Do, do you operate, like if there’s one cha there must have at least one champion who’s like, yes, I will put my career on, on, on the line for this. You know, I think career on the line,…

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