A friend recently asked me how I decide who to work with. It's a deceptively simple question. After thinking about it, I realized that identifying smart people is genuinely a skill, and one that matters more than I initially thought.
The Obvious Signals
There are surface-level indicators that everyone points to. Good schools. Recognizable company names on a resume. These aren't wrong exactly, they're just incomplete. They tell you someone cleared certain bars, but they don't reveal much about how they think or whether they'll actually move things forward.
I've met plenty of people with impressive credentials who couldn't execute. I've also met people without the traditional markers who were exceptional. The correlation exists, but it's weaker than most people assume.
Agency Matters More
What I've learned is that intelligence without agency is just potential energy. The people I want to work with aren't just smart, they're smart with agency. They see a problem and solve it without waiting for permission. They make decisions with incomplete information. They take ownership of outcomes.
Agency is honestly more important than raw intelligence. A smart person who waits for direction is less valuable than someone slightly less capable who figures it out on their own. The former needs structure. The latter creates it. When you're building something, you want people who can operate independently and still move in the same direction.
The Imposter Syndrome Tax
Working with truly smart people is uncomfortable at first. You definitely feel the imposter syndrome. Everyone around you seems to understand things faster, articulate ideas more clearly, have context you lack. It's disorienting.
But that discomfort is the point. I genuinely believe everyone needs to experience that at least once in their life. Being the least capable person in the room forces you to level up. You start noticing patterns in how they think. You absorb their frameworks. Your baseline for what's possible shifts upward.
The imposter syndrome fades, but the growth compounds. A few months working with people who are better than you will accelerate your trajectory more than years of being the smartest person on the team.
In-Person Matters
I truly believe that a smart group of people will work much better together in person. Remote work has its place, but there's something about sitting in the same room that changes the dynamics. Face-to-face conversation forces you to get back to the other person immediatly. You catch the subtle signals that get lost over Slack. You build trust faster.
I've noticed a lot of teams getting back to in-person work, and I see the benefit immediately. Something about seeing each other face to face makes you want to work way more. There's a social pressure, sure, but also a shared energy that's impossible to replicate through a screen. When everyone is focused in the same physical space, the work compounds in ways that feel almost multiplicative.
The Interview Problem
The hardest part is that it's very difficult to assess intelligence in an interview format. You get an hour, maybe two, to evaluate something that normally reveals itself over months. People can rehearse answers. They can signal competence without demonstrating it. The format optimizes for performance, not truth.
This problem might be even more exaggerated in the world of AI. When tools can generate technically correct answers, the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse. The people who are best at prompting an AI to produce interview answers aren't necessarily the ones who will solve hard problems independently.
I don't have a clean solution here. The best proxy I've found is to look at what people have built, not what they say they can build. Past behavior predicts future behavior. If someone has consistently shipped things, solved ambiguous problems, and demonstrated agency, that's worth more than any interview performance.
Trust Your Observations
Ultimately, identifying smart people comes down to paying attention. Watch how they approach problems. Notice whether they ask good questions or just give answers. See if they take ownership or deflect responsibility. These patterns emerge quickly if you're looking for them.
At the end of the day the goal should be to find people who make you better, who push the team forward, and who you genuinely want to work with. That combination is rare, but when you find it, everything else becomes easier.