You haven't lived until you've had a psychopath as a boss and for whatever reason they've decided they don't like you.

Do you feel lucky?

Or they could really like you and make you the first person they call with their insanity and high priority tasks.

Either way, you're in for a bad time.

Been there & won the battle. Talked to the other tech leads and convinced HR and the CTO with our position, that psychopath of a manager ended up getting fired during his probation period.

Been there & got the scars

Yes, sometimes people can say that they want one thing, but in reality they probably don't.

My theory was that there can be some complex set of criteria, including the emotional match, that can determine a better job fit for each person. The challenge here is to determine that set, and develop an assessment tool for both the job seeker and the company/team.

That's an interesting idea. You'd probably need a psychologist to come up with the questionnaire and then maybe you could convince a company to let you run the study. You'd need paired feedback to0... I guess you could ask people to reveal their performance evals anonymously but that might undervalue employee-employer fit. You'd probably want to have these ranked by some outside metric of each company's success. Someone must've already done this, if not it'd be a good research project for a psychology or business school grad student. Sounds like a worthwhile YC startup. Maybe something like "work at a startup" could factor in or run this type of study too.