> My favorite answer was on a phone interview where he just hung up and wouldn't answer when we called back.

Heh ... yeah well I wish I had it to do that.

However, you are asking gotcha questions.

If "I want to see your instincts towards solving a problem" is a "gotcha" then we should just draw lots to hire people.

> you place all burden on high performers

If their PRs don't get merged they don't perform. It is trivial to overload your coworkers with secondary tasks due to your "high performance".

> If their PRs don't get merged they don't perform. It is trivial to overload your coworkers with secondary tasks due to your "high performance".

We're all aware that a huge portion of the busywork that makes a team successful is not actually reflected in their upwards-facing deliverables (increasing test coverage, improving infra, adopting new tools/methodologies, preemptive security patching, etc). Your actual high performers, if you have any, are doing all that stuff in addition to their regularly-scheduled duties.

If management weren't at least tacitly on board with this arrangement, your high performers would go work somewhere else. So my experience is that good managers don't tend to see this your way.

Yeah I agree. I was trying to makee the point that it is quite easy to make yourself blocked by others and it is a deep skill to get other stuff done while blocked anyway, like say cleanups and tests etc.

> it is a deep skill to get other stuff done while blocked anyway, like say cleanups and tests etc.

Which themselves generate more PRs (or larger PRs)...

Didn't you have a Voodoo-card or something? I'm quite sure I could run HL1 on a P166 with a Voodoo-card with ok frame rate.

With a Voodoo I assume you could get it up to 30fps fairly comfortably but they still weren't the most common back then.

Still remember the concern when Quake 3 would require a GPU as they were not entirely ubiquitous then. It was the right more and it helped the industry forward but it was a little pain point at that time.

> get no credit for not having such outages because you can't measure that.

Well from a philosophical point I would argue that you can measure the weight of nothing too.

> Now it's feasible for your local culture to grow its own office suite, operating systems, Active Directory competitor etc. A less interdependent world with more competition does have its advantages.

That is allready solved by FOSS.

> If in doubt... first try raising a few dozen chickens in your yard as a starting point.

No. Just try to make a 5x8 plot to grow vegetables and realise how ridiculously hard it is.

> No. Just try to make a 5x8 plot to grow vegetables and realise how ridiculously hard it is.

That works out as well, yeah.

Chickens have the advantage that they eat almost anything and they'll give you eggs. Loads of eggs. More eggs than you can realistically eat if you're not into weightlifting. And especially, they give you eggs for a looooong time - if you eat that salad or tomato, it's gone. The chicken lasts longer, and you can make it into some delicious soup at the end. But for that you need to be able to stomach killing the chicken, which frankly I do not lol.

There certainly are 10x engineers just that they get most of the x from turning down bad ideas and saving work.

Yeah I feel you. I didn't experience it as extreme as you, but it really sets its marks.

When I go to a store with my kids nowadays I let them spend 10% of what I buy. I whine a bit about buying too crappy plastic toys but that is it.

If they want some silly fruit or bouncy ball they get it.

I hope I don't overcompensate...

Well, you are overcompensating a little. Just let spend their earnings from allowances on anything they want.

How old are you? The internets were way more nice when we were kids. Not in the no 4chan edgelord way but the not toxic algorithmic way.

There is no way feeding YT etc. to kids is at any way good for them, their parents, humanity and so on.

edit: And yes, I agree with you.

Amazon wanted a deal that was just bad for NY.