What I mean by taste
Taste is the ability to recognize what's good, even when you can't fully articulate why. A designer with taste sees a layout and knows it's off, even if they can't immediately name the problem. An engineer with taste reads a function and knows it'll be hard to maintain.
Why we hire for it
Skills you can teach. Taste you can't. We can ramp up an engineer's Go skills in two months. We can't fix their judgment about what's worth building.
When you have a small team and high autonomy, every person's individual judgment compounds. Bad judgment in one person breaks more than a missed deadline.
How we screen for it
We give portfolio reviews more weight than coding tests. We ask candidates to critique published work, ours and competitors'. We ask "what's a product you love that has bad design?" and listen to the answer.
Taste shows in how someone talks about their work, what they choose to defend, what they're embarrassed by.