[pekk]

Being partly facetious here: I don't know how you actually propose not to hire jerks. The industry is full of jerks. Jerks are doing the interview much of the time. The industry wants people who claim to be the best, and that's hard to do while also selecting for niceness.

[wpietri]

Personally, I have a bias against subjects who claim to be the best. Some of the best people I've worked with, would say things like, "Oh, I guess I'm ok at that" and then blow me away. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect [1] in action.

Because of that, I generally avoid people to self-evaluate versus others. I think it's ok to ask them to compare on purely internal things (e.g., "What languages are you strongest in"); people seem pretty good at that.

I think that approach makes it a lot easier to hire nice people; niceness and humility are correlated.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

[konradb]

I like Lao Tzu's take on this:

'Those who know don't talk. Those who talk don't know.'.

[iyulaev]

The industry wants people who claim to be the best, and that's hard to do while also selecting for niceness.

Absolutely true. The reason I point this out is that the cost of a jerk goes up as the size of the team he/she is on increases. If you are a 3-man start-up, hiring a superstar coder who's sometimes a PITA can be worthwhile - have them work on some part of the project where they drive the whole thing. At 20 people, that person can become a huge liability - they will misdirect the team, demoralize other engineers, and eventually cause your best people to leave.

My examples illustrate how you might identify people with an uncontrollable mean streak during the candidate process, and hence filter them out. If you're building a scalable organization you must start with founders that aren't jerks and weed these people out of the candidate pool. If you start the company off with such a person, well, either live with it or find a new company.