bespoke_engnr

So I started an online fountain pen shop: https://www.bottleandplume.com - it's focused entirely on all the stuff I love: fountain pens, fountain-pen friendly paper, bottled inks, and everything else you'd want or need if you were getting into the hobby, playing with .

I got lucky with timing a few marketing things and it's grown considerably, with lots of repeat customers (I'm really active in the community, not as a business strategy but as a result of my fountain pen addiction, so that helps).

I have a tech job that pays the bills so I'm more focused on having fun and building the fountain pen store I wish existed than on squeezing every last dollar out of my customers and business. It's a lot of work but I'm really enjoying it.

It's a work in progress but might be helpful to someone!

I'm also sad to see MIT so overrepresented in their ranks, presumably because the founder went to MIT: https://web.archive.org/web/20170511234303/http://www.blackb...

Perhaps there's an ethics course missing from the curriculum?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do...

    Masayoshi Son: What does your company do?

    Neumann: We lease office buildings, spruce up the space and sublet it in small chunks.

    Son: Hmm I invest in visionary tech stuff, this doesn’t really sound like my thing.

    Neumann: Did I mention we are a state of consciousness. A generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs.

    Son: Okay yeah that’s more like—

    Neumann: The world’s first physical social network. We encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds.

    Son: You’re crazy! I love it! But could you be, say, ten times crazier?

    Neumann: You’re going to invest $10 billion in my company, which I will use as kindling to light the whole edifice on fire, and then when we are both standing in the ashes you will pay me another billion dollars to walk away while I laugh at you.

    Son: All my life I have dreamed of meeting someone as crazy as you, but I never really believed this day would come. 

    Neumann: I’m gonna use your money to buy a mansion with a room shaped like a guitar, where I will play the world’s tiniest violin after all your money is gone. 

    Son: YES PUNCH ME IN THE FACE.

    Neumann: Also I’ll rename the company “We” and charge it $6 million for the name.

    Son: RUN ME OVER WITH A TRUCK.

Things like "what's your favorite software environment," "what tech hobbies have you played around with," "what's the most complicated infrastructure you've ever had to work with," "talk about a difficult outage that you were a part of diagnosing and fixing."

I guess I've chosen to stay technical, so I haven't seen a lot of the questions mentioned in the original article. They seem pretty like fairly easy behavioral questions to game, I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative ratio looks like there. Although I guess you can say that for any interview question.