Smart people go to startups

My recent blackpill is that fang interviews are not harder than startup interviews. The fang interviewer is just dumber. When I interviewed for software engineering at Stripe in 2018, I thought startups had a higher bar. The fang ones. My way. The fang ones. I'm on and I'm startup interviewing candidates. I understand. I interview two candidates and I move one forward and reject the other one. It's not because their answers were so like on paper, if I just recorded their answers to the questions, the answers might look indistinguishable. But the difference is how they answered. What kind of clarifying questions they asked to the answer. A startup asking easier questions. Mean. Doesn't mean the bar is lower. Because the candidate can still have a stellar response to an easy question. But simpler questions allow the candidate to feel more at ease and have less anxiety. Because the premise of the question is simpler. And then they can really demonstrate clear first and strategic thinking, which startups really need. But it also means that the interview has to listen carefully to gauge how good the responses were. And that very few interviews will be standardized because they'll meander down a bunch of different routes. The reason big tech companies ask harder interviews is because it needs to be more standardized and less customized because there are so many interviewers. And the average person at a startup is smarter than the average person at a fang. And because not all the interviewers at a fang company can listen carefully enough for strategic first principles thinking in interviews that all look different from one interview to the next.