You can teach skill. Taste takes longer and matters more.

The people who changed my companies most weren’t the most skilled ones. They were the ones with taste — able to look at three acceptable options and know, quickly and usually correctly, which one was right.

Skill is what you can do. Taste is knowing what’s worth doing. They come apart more often than you’d expect.

What taste looks like in an interview

You can’t ask about it directly; everyone says they care about quality. What I look for instead:

They can describe something they killed. Not a failure — a deliberate deletion. Something that worked, removed because it wasn’t earning its place. People without taste rarely delete; they accumulate.

Their criticism is specific and generous. Ask about a product they think is badly made. Weak answers are contemptuous and vague. Good answers name the constraint the team was probably under, and then say what they’d have done instead.

They notice small wrongness. The misaligned thing, the sentence that says nothing, the metric that can’t mean what it claims. Taste is largely a low tolerance for things being slightly off, sustained for years without becoming exhausting to work with.

The part I got wrong for years

I treated taste as innate — you had it or you didn’t — and hired for it as a filter. That was lazy, and a bit arrogant.

Taste is mostly exposure plus feedback, compressed. People develop it fast in an environment where quality gets discussed out loud and where they can see the reasoning behind decisions, not just the decisions.

So the thing I actually control isn’t finding people who already have taste. It’s whether my company is a place where taste can develop. Are decisions explained? Is it safe to say this isn’t good enough yet? Does anyone get to watch a thing get better, in stages, and understand why?

If nobody can see the reasoning, nobody can learn the judgment.

That’s the whole thesis. Hire for the low tolerance for wrongness; build the environment that turns it into judgment.