Interesting. My criteria for hiring is the opposite of this, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If someone is technically great but combative in an interview, they get a "strong no" from me.

It's nothing big: especially in a startup environment there will be situations where the product manager or another engineer will ask for changes, and I expect people to adapt, or at least to argue the merits of the change. Make no mistake, a lot of those people WERE able to adapt code-wise, and I was even praising them, but they did the changes while voicing concerns and complaining that my task "was badly defined, since I didn't tell them about possible future changes". One got very annoyed verbally at a small requisite change, even though we still had only used half the scheduled time, but we were almost finished with everything.

And this HAS paid off! This happened rarely, but more than half of those people got incredibly triggered by their rejections, and a couple even demanded talking directly with the team. In one case, we had someone coming to the company. It wasn't a lot, I must have interviewed over 200-300 people there, but it was significant.

> Interesting. My criteria for hiring is the opposite of this, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If someone is technically great but combative in an interview, they get a "strong no" from me.

Well exactly, but that’s “vibes” in the view of an extremely objective hiring criteria that tries to eliminate anyone’s subjective feelings about the candidate.