From the hiring manager perspective it’s a numbers game of time and risk mitigation. Firing people sucks; managing people out sucks. Not firing people that should be fired sucks. Unless you’re in a big company with centralized hiring and onboarding, having headcount that needs an expensive ramp up period sucks.
If you’ve done a lot of different things because you’re smart and creative, maybe I’ll have to spend more time making sure you’re motivated (so you’d have to be worth the extra time cost). It’s also common to see people with an ungrounded perception of their abilities, and I often see breadth-heavy people suffer from an inflated sense of their own abilities due to lots of small scale, diverse wins.
Most people don’t understand how valuable a hard worker who will agreeably take orders and deliver consistent results is; magnitude doesn’t even matter that much. Unless you’re single handedly driving significant business metrics (e.g., directly saving millions of dollars), from my perspective, my job success is tied to predicting your output. If I succeed, I get to expand the teams or build new ones. If a product release is late or buggy, it’s also wasting tons of other teams’ time or damaging customer relationships besides pushing the eng roadmap back.
We reject a bunch of faang people for having experience we don’t find valuable. If you work at a big tech company, but don’t have an impactful role, you’re potentially not going to succeed in a small startup at the level you’re demanding.
Finally, one bad hire can ruin a team (i.e., one bad hire converts others into bad hires). “Bad” is subjective and can refer to different things. At the end of the day, it’s my job to define it and make sure we’re avoiding it. You can ask about this in an initial phone screen, or in a follow up conversation because it’s not secret, but I can’t talk to you about it after we reject you due to lability.