> He's pedigreed from a great CS school and worked at multiple well known big-tech companies, so have assumed that he's a high performing, action orientated programmer prior to start up life.<p>This is often a formula for being very competent at execution within given rules. Top school has a formula for getting in. Big tech companies have product people to guide you on what to do. My team has UX people to design the buttons, product to tell us the inputs and outputs, operations to define those inputs and outputs in detail, QA to ensure it is correct, devops to run all the tests, etc. I really do just write code to execute a vision.<p>I went to a well recognized school. I work for a big tech firm as one of my jobs (haven't done multiple yet). Nowhere in there was I really making open ended decisions and frankly I would be a bit terrified of decision making as I haven't made a non code related one for years. It is my job to build the dream, not define it. There are a whole pile of automated guardrails present from devops to QA to product that prevent bugs, so while I do my best, it is hardly the same as having to be completely responsible.<p>I couldn't even demo the product I have contributed to for the past two years even, simply because as a backend engineer I never open the whole thing so have no idea where the buttons are on frontend (teams have both).<p>I once joined a much smaller team without those guardrails and I was considered an underperformer on that team for not redesigning the form to be more user friendly. I was given a sketch and I just built it, despite knowing that it probably wasn't great. But with my current employer, that is what you are supposed to do. With that employer, they were unhappy I didn't change things to improve it.<p>I don't think you are being unreasonable, but you picked up on some wacky signals that I don't think signal what you believe they do.<p>You need someone who regularly hacks projects in their spare time and has built something from scratch on their own before, ideally multiple things. You want a product engineering person, which I suspect this guy has never done.