Therefore, why do you even need so many personal information on me? Is it that you wanna be friends? Sure, let's meet tonight at venue X and then we can take this talk from here. But here, now, we're both on business, aren't we? So again, why are you asking so many personal questions?

You want to be sure that I'm competent enough to do the work you need to be done just right? Of course. Then sure, just put a computer in front of me, give me a list of n tasks (and/or problems) which resemble (or even actually are) what you want me to do on your project, and shut up for 30 minutes, so I can solve them. Or alternatively, I have a laptop in my backpack, I'm okay with using it, if you want. You can think "Phew, but everybody can do n tasks, what's the sense in that?"? Then make the tasks/problems hard enough, making it that only the people you're looking for can possibly solve it. Or even make them very hard, to the extent it's very much possible you won't see a single correct solution in a year or two, if that is what you think suits you.[0]

I strongly feel like, with today's and tomorrow's demands, we need a completely new model for hiring people. Otherwise, loads of real talent is getting wasted and that eventually leaves everyone unsatisfied: PMs working with people they don't like working with, and programmers working on things they don't feel compatible with at all. Why are we wasting a real possibility of matching people at least a bit more "right"? You may ask, how to get there? First, throw away completely unnecessary for purely technical positions things called "resumes".[1] What you've done in the past =/= who you are. Shouldn't that be obvious?

There's often one more huge asset often needed in work. That is communication and teamwork skills, of course. But this could be benchmarked just as simply as technical abilities. If teamwork is important on a given position, instead of giving me a list of problems to solve, put me at a desk with 5 or 10 fellow interviewees and then give not me, but us - a list of problems to solve, so we can attempt to do it being a team, working together.[2]

You see, I grew up surrounded by the "hacker culture". Definitions what this thing even is may vary from person to person, but it doesn't matter here. In some particular contexts, I'm perfectly okay with being called, say, "c5056e649b904c234bb9c2" or any other pseudonymous identifier you may imagine, instead of my "real life" name. It's 2024, so we're probably gonna do everything remote (= in the cyberspace) anyway, so isn't it obviously a better fit, then? Even more, if I'm solely on my business, and so are you, I definitely prefer it this way. No need for overload of personal things in such case.

The thing is, that in an imaginary-but-common situation I'm describing, we definitely aren't here to deeply get to know each other and found a start-up stemming from our combined experiences, in hopes to someday possibly grow big and change the world. Sorry not sorry, face the facts, there's a great deal of possibility that now we're here simply to be able to feed ourselves. And also very possibly to get some money, in order to be able to work on, and invest in, what possibly one really believe in and want to be doing in the future. Then why make it so complicated? Just because we've always been doing it this way? Is the mere desire to stick to what we're familiar with a valid justification for all these real and huge sacrifices?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD3iBrqPP6Y (one can use e.g. yt-dlp, or Chromium's devtools on Network tab, to get a transcript)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMtyJw4NED8