Interviewing really is a distinct skill from contributing and the more people crank it the more it seems to test for interview ability.

I suspect (and have seen some evidence) that the interviews he aced were algo-based. Doing well in these is very repeatable, with low additional effort. Behavioural are much harder to do at scale.

IQ tests are also distinct skills but IQ scores are the most quantifiable and studied numbers in all of psychology and correlate with all kinds of things like job performance.

I think the purpose of the interview is the same thing. Even though there's no strong evidence for a correlation it's reasonable to believe intuitively that there is.

this email? https://x.com/var_epsilon/status/1940492841232584745

That's a particularly terrible cold email, you can tell he didn't even bother applying some basic personalisation to it outside of [COMPANY_NAME]

Nutshell: Toxic founders who want developers to code 24X7 may hired him seeing this.

ding ding ding. both soham + recruiter implied he basically just codes day and night. our founder (yc) was drooling! there's a very specific type of company + founder that falls for this stuff. no surprise he targeted ai startups.

Yes, this is probably what happened. Not like he was a super human engineer.