People Decisions
31+ recent decisions
An ambiguous interview verdict is a no - hold the bar rather than adding interviewers
Sep 7, 2026 · people · low73% confidence
Steve Wallace reported on the security engineer req that he had interviewed Jared, a contact of Greg, and had told Brianne and Greg that he was not a yes but not a no. Wallace proposed pushing the candidate on to CeeLo or TJ to gather more input. Peter closed it on the spot: not a clear yes and not a clear no means no, leave it as a no. He framed the rule rather than the case - he would rather hold a high bar, and if a candidate is not a giant yes, move on.
People: Steve Wallace, Greg Kurtzer
Sensitive Decision
Extend Karl Lowenbjer under Wallace and land Atlas and Motherbrain in Engineering
Sep 7, 2026 · people · medium85% confidence
After spending the prior week reading the Motherbrain and Atlas code Karl Lowenbjer built under Tabatha, Peter concluded it was quite good - really well architected and thought through. Chris Baek did not want to keep Karl on the Operations side. In the Thursday 1:1 Peter pitched Wallace directly on taking both the contractor and the applications, telling him he is pretty sure Wallace ends up being the one asked to maintain things like Motherbrain and Atlas anyway. Wallace agreed the same call, having independently run a compliance and security read of the code and landed in the same place. On Saturday Peter DMed Karl himself, told him his contract ends in about a week and a half, and asked whether he wanted to let it end or extend it under Peter - then asked Sarah for 30 minutes with Karl on Tuesday or Wednesday to work it out.
People: Steve Wallace, Karl Lowenbjer, Chris Baek
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Hire Jori Koolstra now - go into the interview intending to sell, then compress the loop to days
Aug 31, 2026 · people · high94% confidence
Peter had a 10:00 interview with Jori Koolstra for the Linux Kernel Development Engineer role on Aug 30 (a Sunday). Beforehand he asked Nathan Blackham directly whether the slot was an interview or a sell, and said his own plan was already sell: I hope it is sell because that is my plan. I also really hope I like this guy because I LOVE his resume. Immediately after the call he told Nathan Hire him now. That is my take, and in the group DM with Nathan and Brianne Clasen he wrote We should hire Jori. Like... today. In #distinguished-leaders, replying to Bjorn Hovland asking whether anything ever happened with Tim Pepper and saying We need to be better at evangelizing Rocky and We just do not have an active community leader over there, Peter volunteered the same candidate: I also interviewed a kernel engineer candidate that I LOVED today (background in math) who wants to spend a lot of time evangelizing Rocky upstream and building a community. Bjorn replied Get him. Nathan confirmed the next morning that it was a sell, said he would get the roundtable scheduled for today or tomorrow, and added that he might be trying to get him out earlier.
People: Nathan Blackham, Brianne Clasen, Bjorn Hovland, Jori Koolstra
Answer the Gauntlet adoption fight as a cross-team communication problem and take it to the managers meeting as a case study rather than mandating the tool
Aug 28, 2026 · people · medium67% confidence
Ryan Smith team reads core engineering non-adoption of the Gauntlet test framework as a not-invented-here rejection. Justin Haynes team has an existing test harness that already meets their needs, so Gauntlet does not solve a critical pain point for them and the switching cost and risk are high. In the 2026-08-28 Justin 1:1 Peter diagnosed the friction as a communication breakdown rather than a technical one, and declined both available shortcuts - he did not mandate adoption and he did not arbitrate the tool. Instead he took it as the concrete case study on cross-team dynamics for the next managers meeting, with an action item on himself to add Gauntlet and cross-team communications to the Tuesday Horde agenda and to ask Justin to remind him.
People: Justin Haynes, Ryan Smith
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Keep the reference requirement because the failure to produce one is the signal - not because the reference itself is worth reading
Aug 24, 2026 · people · low66% confidence
On Aug 22, in the hiring group DM, Brianne Clasen asked whether a kernel candidate should still submit references after Nathan Blackham had objected that the ones offered were not from the relevant period of the person work history. Peter kept the requirement and separated it from its stated purpose: he would like to get one, not so much because he cares about the reference itself, but because if someone cannot find one, there is something going on. Brianne confirmed she had read it the same way. Nathan then offered to supply names of people from the relevant team the candidate could approach, which makes the negative result meaningful rather than an artefact of the candidate not knowing who to ask.
People: Brianne Clasen, Nathan Blackham
Sensitive Decision
Define the forward-deployed deployment hire as a spearhead and work-distributor whose job is to work themselves out of a job - and reject the all-remote premise outright
Aug 24, 2026 · people · high90% confidence
In the Aug 24 Ryan/Peter/Bjorn session on the forward-deployed engineering org, Bjorn framed the headcount - one head for deployment, sitting under Ryan, Core42 as the prototype, jack of all trades, paid real money rather than the slightly junior mold-them profile Ryan usually favours. Peter locked onto Bjorn word spearhead and redefined the role around it: it is great if this person can do a pile of the work and they should be able to sanity check it, but the core capability is getting to know the rest of Ryan org, knowing the capabilities, and being able to tap a shoulder and say I need Arsalan for 14 hours here, I need somebody in Nathan org for 14 hours here. They do not need to do it all themselves, they need to be a distributor of work. He added the geographic requirement - willing to be anywhere in the world - and rejected the stated Core42 premise flatly: the plan with Core42 is that it is all remote setup, 100 percent, my confidence that that is true is zero, absolutely zero. On the long-term shape he split from Bjorn deliberately: Bjorn does not want the person plugged in long-term, Peter said he expects they will be, and that he is not arguing, he wants them acting as if their job is to not be there later. He named why he likes it as a support role - the person stands up repeatable, stampable systems so that most customer issues funnel into Ryan down-the-middle support funnels rather than back to the deployment person. Ryan took the JD first draft and named a candidate, Chris Wolford former number two based in Florida.
People: Ryan Smith, Bjorn Hovland
Trade a company-wide VP definition to get Greg to ratify the engineering ladder - structure first, names later
Aug 24, 2026 · people · high93% confidence
In the Aug 24 1:1, Peter walked Greg through the engineering leveling spreadsheet. He deliberately separated ratifying the STRUCTURE from mapping the PEOPLE, saying he wanted Greg bought into the structure and cared much less about the mapping for now. The ladder collapses roughly 27 levels to four IC levels - Engineer, Senior, Principal, Distinguished - plus Technical Fellow retained as a title outside the ladder rather than a level, and leadership reporting to Peter as either VP or Director with no Senior anythings. Greg objected to VP on optics grounds. Peter did not defend the word, he defended the need: I wanted a senior leader and a junior leader title, what we call them I am far less interested in. The two then jointly settled a company-wide convention: VP spans organizations and reports to a C-suite, SVP means junior C-suite where no CXO title is being given, Directors can report to either. Peter committed unilaterally: you will never see me arguing for a VP that does not report to me. Greg accepted, and asked that the ladder not be built in a vacuum but be made cross-applicable and run as an org-wide initiative with Mariah. Peter agreed and took the write-up. They ended at Peter stating they were 85 percent aligned.
People: Greg Kurtzer, Mariah Rippee
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Re-anchor the no-more-Amazon-blood rule on the deficit it was actually naming - what the org is short of is people who have had a startup collapse under them, not people with different opinions about Linux
Aug 21, 2026 · people · medium74% confidence
Across the Friday roundtable and the Nathan 1:1 Peter restated a hiring rule he had previously given as no more Amazon blood. In the roundtable he opened on the first candidate by saying he almost wanted to disqualify him purely on years of Amazon experience, that it has become absolutely critical to get a broader set of blood into the organization, and conceded that since stating the rule he has let two more people in and gets why. He then corrected Nathan reading of it - it is not about bad Amazon, it is that there is so much Amazon that there is not enough discussion about how we solve problems. In the 1:1 he specified it precisely: the thing he is pushing on is how you internalize the risk of not moving quickly. At Amazon the cost of slowness is somebody misses a promotion or a bonus; at CIQ the company goes under. He said Nathan is not less aggressive because of ability but because he has not had a startup collapse underneath him, and that what it boils down to is a few more people in your org that just have experience at startups. He closed by saying explicitly he is not shooting for differences in how people think about Linux - it is differences in work experience.
People: Nathan Blackham, Andrew Jorgensen, Jonathan Dieter, Justin Haynes
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Compress the Leandro Dorileo hire into a single week and run his final interview as a sell call rather than an evaluation - on the strength of Nathan like-mind endorsement alone
Aug 13, 2026 · people · medium86% confidence
Nathan told Peter that Leandro (Leo) is one of a very small set of people - alongside Andrew and Dieter - with whom he can sit down and know they understand the in and out of OS engineering, and that he would have offered on the spot. Peter asked what he should cover; Nathan answered sell call. Peter accepted that framing without pushing back, immediately compressed the timeline (I would love to get it handled before the end of the week), asked Brianne to schedule a decision call for Friday morning, and told Nathan to chase Dieter and Jeff for scorecards - proceeding to his own 2pm interview before those scorecards existed. Two hours after the 1:1 he confirmed in Slack: I think I sold him. I am a yes. Lets move.
People: Nathan Blackham, Brianne Clasen, Leandro Dorileo
Hire Hailey Mothershead without reservation, and take John Paul as a qualified yes with a standing instruction not to chase him if he declines
Aug 13, 2026 · people · medium97% confidence
At the Aug 12 kernel round table Peter gave two very different verdicts. On Hailey he was unreserved - I would hire her today, I thought she was smart, I thought she was inquisitive, I think she will work incredibly well with the team - and said that at a smaller company he would have called Brianne right after the interview and not let her leave the building without papers in front of her. He named his one real concern, a complete lack of C experience, and dismissed it as learnable, and flagged that she will find CIQ feedback culture blunt. On John Paul he deferred entirely to the technical panel, said he did not enjoy the interactions, did not believe JP is interested in what CIQ is doing, agreed with Shreeya read that they are getting roughly a year, and said he would not block a consensus yes. He then added the operative instruction: if we make an offer to him and he does not accept, let us not kill ourselves to make it work out. He closed the meeting with I know this team has felt pressured. I do not want this pressure to bring in the wrong person.
People: Nathan Blackham, Brianne Clasen, Sultan Alsawaf, Shreeya Patel, Jonathan Maple
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Set a six-month horizon on migrating low-value work off Damens plate - naming it the one change he requires from Justin, while refusing the headcount answer until the work is concretely scoped
Aug 11, 2026 · people · medium80% confidence
Following back-to-back 1:1s with Joseph and then Damen - the second scheduled entirely because of what Joseph said, which Peter confirmed unprompted as 100 percent of it - Peter reported one yellow flag. Damens interrupt load splits into two buckets: stuff that is worth his time and stuff that is a complete waste of someone with his brains time. His judgment: he is fine right now, but if he is still carrying that percentage in six months, I do not think he will be fine. So it is figuring out how we get stupid off of Damens plate. But that is it. That was the only significant takeaway for me of a change that I need to ensure happens. And it does not have to happen today. It is just, it is a migration. When Justin floated hiring college students, Peter declined the shape while keeping the door open: I do not want to bring in three college students just because, but if you can stare at something and go, one relatively smart kid could hold the reins on these things and free Damen up, yeah, I am happy to have that conversation - I am going to want to have a conversation in a concrete manner around what you want this person or persons doing. He tested the AI substitute first and rejected it for a specific reason: can AI do the stupid work in front of Damen, and when Justin said that is what he uses it for, Peter pushed back - that is what he uses it for, but it is still him driving it, somebody has still got to drive it.
People: Justin Haynes, Damen Knight, Joseph
Sensitive Decision
Give the Fuzzball engineering team the Arcee credit ahead of Bjorn, in writing, in their own channel - then cross-post it to department heads so the framing is on the record
Aug 11, 2026 · people · medium92% confidence
Arcee closed on Aug 6 - the first major Fuzzball deal, to an AI lab that will run a model training run on the product. On Aug 7 Peter posted a note to #fuzzball that opened by naming and then subordinating the commercial credit: Bjorn pounds his chest about getting the deal across the line (and he earned that - he was hounding them daily). But you are the reason there was a deal to close. They did not buy a pitch. They bought Fuzzball. Everyone here understands that, and I want to make sure you hear it from me directly. He acknowledged the cost - I know about the long nights and weekends that went into making that happen. Thank you. It is not lost on me - and then added three forward statements: the standard is now understood so this gets easier from here, Arcee is the first of these and it is the worst Fuzzball deployment that is ever going to happen, a reference customer changes the conversations we get to have with the next AI lab and with investors, and this team has changed gears and is holding the pace, which is the hard part. He then reposted the whole message into #department-heads with the framing just so you all have visibility into what I am telling the Fuzzball engineering org. He had told Chris Wolford in their 1:1 that morning that Bjorn will pat himself on the back for getting the deal across the line, and yeah, he was hounding them daily, but your team did the work - and tagged Mini-Me in the same breath to remind him to send it that evening.
People: Chris Wolford, Bjorn Hovland
Mondays session with the Linux org is universally positive - period, full stop - and any fix-things conversation goes to a separate meeting
Jul 30, 2026 · people · medium78% confidence
Gregs company-wide 1:1s surfaced that the Linux organization - Nathans and Justins teams together - is measurably less optimistic about the future of the company than the rest of CIQ. Not massively unoptimistic, but a clear differential. Peter checked the instrument before trusting it: he watched a couple of recordings of Gregs 1:1s just to make sure that he was not leading the witness and asking the question the same way in all of them, and judged he was doing a pretty good job of it. His response is a Monday session with Nathans team, and he set a hard constraint on its contents. Content: state the finding transparently to the team, then walk them through what he is seeing in the Middle East from his second trip and from the Axiom Space meetings - we are seeing a massive uptick in our ability to do business - then walk them through what dealing with Google over the last week and a half has been like, explicitly attributing his own ability to do it to their groundwork: I got to do that because of the work that your team has done, laying the groundwork, and I want them to hear that, understand it, I want to thank them for it. Constraint: It should be just a universally positive meeting with your team on Monday. Period. Full stop. And I really want it to stay focused on being a universally positive meeting. If there are places where we want to talk about fixing things or tweaking things, that can be another meeting. But I do not want to muddy the message at all. He also gave Nathan the entire rationale in advance rather than staging it - I will say all of this to them, super transparently.
People: Nathan Blackham, Greg Kurtzer, Justin Haynes