Indeed, not 100% clear but it felt like GP was criticizing the kid.

The kid enters a security related conversation and Bram not only listens but engages in the conversation. Seems like you missed on a great hire.

Bram listened to and engaged in most conversations, I think. He was very approachable.

The young guy was fairly skilled at technical stuff, but his story about arguing with Bram was an insight into his interpersonal skills. It wasn't what lost him the spot though. I personally liked him but he didn't really perform on the nuts and bolts challenges we present to candidates.

They're not particularly difficult challenges, just things to see how a candidate approaches a problem. I don't remember what exactly was disconcerting about his approach but I feel like he took a lot of short cuts via google searching and didn't exactly understand what he was doing. This was years ago back when we did in-person interviews though, so my memory isn't 100% on it.

We have a lot of extremely intelligent people with small egos at my company and cockyness like that doesn't really fit super well with our group.

The article talks about modesty and meeting in the middle, but I get the impression that the younger dev didn’t want to budge or understand the other point being made by Bram.

I haven't followed that but that is having an opinion. Sometimes you can only agree on disagreeing.