zwayhowder

I have two approaches, one is hiring on a day rate with a view to convert. The day rate contract provides a lot more flexibility if things don't work out. Though I've only parted ways with a single digit percentage of such hires in the last 10 years.

The second approach is hiring junior/mid level's and mentoring them into the senior roles. It takes a little longer, but the hours of mentoring are a much more effective use of my time than interviewing hundreds of candidates in my experience.

I've been out of the game for 2 years, so I can only imagine with LLM assisted coding my second option would be even faster.

All that's predicated on test driven development to minimise the load on seniors for peer reviews.

This took me back to my first PC gaming experience at age 6ish. Circa 1988. Nostalgia unlocked!

Funny you should ask. In high school I was regarded as highly intelligent, I was near the top of all of my classes and widely read, with an excellent memory for facts and figures. (Though no visual memory whatsoever).

Then one day we did a IQ test in science class. I scored near the bottom of the class. All of the geometry based "what comes next" puzzles left me flummoxed. Because I couldn't visualise, I couldn't rotate images in my head to identify patterns and so many of the questions were like that.

It's not even on the same level. Container tabs as the name implies are all in the same window, and you can program them, for example always open up google.com domains in my Google container, while opening amazon.com in my shopping container.

This keeps the cookies separate and means you are tracked less. Yes you can manually do this with Chrome profiles, but before this feature was introduced into Firefox I had a dozen or more Chrome profiles to keep all my work, community and personal Google/Microsoft logins separate.

I have been toying with the idea of introducing something like JD to my system using tags though so something can be both.

I use Paperless to catalog all my PDFs, Obsidian for notes and Gmail for email, Todoist for tasks and Cloze for CRM, all of which support tags.

One thing that I fully internalised only recently - despite learning Asian languages for literally decades. The things western people take for granted as ubiquitous in our culture are often unknown to Asian cultures.

As an example recently talking to a Japanese friend who is the same age as me we realised she had seen less than 10% of the movies that "everyone born in the early 80's has seen". She didn't know who OJ Simpson was, nor is she familiar with Henry VIII and his 6 wives. She knew the Backstreet Boys & One Direction, but not Take That nor East 17.

Traveling in China a few years ago I was surprised to see many Hokusai images used on clothing and shop decorations.

The Mona Lisa might be the western world's most famous artwork, but you rarely see it on a T-shirt unless you're meeting a tourist near the Louvre. I suspect that if both were in still trademarked that Hokusai would be making orders of magnitude more on royalties than Da Vinci...

I briefly flirted with a Japanese keyboard just to get the extra keys that they have (next to the space bar which is much smaller) I then remapped those keys to other more useful commands.

I then discovered VIA/QMK keyboards and now I have keycaps I can't even see on my vertically mounted split-key keyboard and more programmability than I know what to do with. But in 2012, a Japanese Keyboard was much cheaper than a Kinesis and to me the only option.

I grew up playing 1/72nd tabletop wargames with my dad and his friends - Napoleonic to WW2 usually. Often with Star Wars/Trek or Babylon 5 on the TV.

This was our 3am conversations.

My house is about 100 years old and still has the original concrete tile roof, with a stack of spare tiles under the house ready if needed.

An extension that was done in the 1980s has had to have its roof replaced once already due to what I have to assume was poor workmanship by the builder.

I used to work backstage at concerts assisting my dad who was a sound engineer. We had my favourite cable of all time, a 30cm extension cord that was affectionately known as the "you've got to be #&$@ing me" cord. You'd run a 40m extension cord up and around the stage and get to the light you needed to plug in and you'd always be just short.

When I went into IT I quickly made myself some 30cm long Ethernet cables with a keystone on one end for just such an occasion.

This surprised me when I was on my local government and we had an application for a 24/7 carwash. When I asked why they thought it would be profitable to be open overnight with staff they said that the local car dealerships would book dozens of cars in every night, they were actually busier from 9pm to 6am than the rest of the day.

I keep a dozen books by von Daniken and his contemporaries on my bookcase to this day. Not because I believe them, but to remind me that I once did. I like to blame the X-Files, but the 90s was a funny time and I don't even remember buying all these books, but I sure believed them for a while.