Most people do not have a problem with the jackboot of authority, so long as it is on their feet rather than their neck.

This is the worst crime of all.

Paypal is a scam company now. It wasnâ(TM)t really a scam company when it was originally founded. It broke new ground in paying for stuff on the web when the web was in its infancy. It was also had to deal with massive scams coming from the other direction, faux customers.

Bitcoin companies seem to be having a much worse problem with being scams than Paypal did, at least until it was sold off by the founders to EBay at which point, yes it turned in to an obnoxious, kind of a scam company.

It should also be noted 9/11, the Patriot act and the 2008 crash all happened in there which made Paypal increasingly obnoxious in reaction to crushing Federal scrutiny of and intrusion in to financial transactions.

Point her to the Elon Musk TED talk. When asked how he did so many amazing things, one of his more insightful comments was he learned physics, and he learned how to approach things from the bottom up the way a physicist would. If you learn something at a fundamental level you can do amazing and new things. If you learn stuff, shallowly, from the top down, you often end up copying others which is both less amazing and less valuable.

Also has pretty good lessons for all the wanna be startup founders in Silicon Vally who are doing Uber of . . . or AirBNB of . . ., me too companies.

He also covers doing big, hard things for the benefit of humanity part pretty well.

Those Barbie thumb drives already have them. Not my fault you haven't discovered it yet.

Go work for a contractor. Get to know the feds. Then your resume magically moves to the top in usajobs.gov.

It really depends on the individual role, the team as a whole, and the individual being hired. I shouldn't have used numbers as people are entirely too hung up on it.

Really? Do you know how many talented developers who are completely and utterly 'dysfunctional' themselves and cause irrevocable damage to the team and its work output? It's not something I enjoy dealing with as much as helping people continue to grow and learn.

Depending on what need I'm trying to fill, I hire 90% for culture fit and 10% for technical ability. Most often, people can learn to improve their technical ability, especially b/c there is very rarely any single individual who can fill an open req 100%. That said, what I have found cannot be learned as well, is how to fit into an organization's culture.

Broad experience is great and I wholly support companies which are looking to add resources who possess such knowledge; however, broad experience can come with the price of not having enough targeted knowledge to bring deep-dive specifics to the mix.

The real question you should be asking is whether they can figure it out on their own if tasked with finding a solution to the problem. I guarantee you that most of those you have cast aside due to their lack of public-key cryptography knowledge would be able to do so while bringing you the specific knowledge you need straight out of their heads.

Honestly, if you interviewed me and I didn't know the answer to some mostly irrelevant question and told me that's why I didn't get the job, I would thank you for not hiring me to work with someone who doesn't know enough about being a hiring manager to do his job effectively.

Throw me the whip and I'll throw you the idol!