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.
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.
In my experience with IQ tests involving complete the sequence many of the solutions when I looked up the intent behind them made very little sense to me.
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 use a Boox Note 2 almost daily for reading and regularly with a bluetooth keyboard for writing. It has a stylus, and the OCR is good enough for even my terrible handwriting (I should have been a doctor apparently) and I use that to scribble in the margin of PDFs etc.
My setup uses Autosync [1] to synchronise a folder from my desktop to the device. On my desktop I have Zotero (a Citation library) and Calibre both configured to export to that folder (in subfolders). With two way sync my notes are back on my PC almost instantly which is fantastic.
> OCR is good enough for even my terrible handwriting
Challenge accepted! I can't even read my own handwriting anymore, I would be incredibly impressed if an OCR can.
It's sort of a feedback loop; my handwriting is bad, so I type everything, so I never use a pen, so I don't practice my handwriting, so my handwriting gets worse. As it stands, I don't think I've written anything with pen and paper (other than a signature) since ~2021?
I've thought about picking up something in the Boox series but they've always been just a bit too pricey for me to justify; I'm afraid it would be yet another tablet thing that I use for a week and then just ends up collecting dust under my bed (of which I have a bunch).
> I can't even read my own handwriting anymore, I would be incredibly impressed if an OCR can.
An online OCR system like this has more information than you do as it knows stroke order, direction, and possibly timing. I wouldn't be surprised if there are devices that can read writing the writer can't.
I switched to vertical typing. It was a challenge at first, but now I can type almost as well vertically as I can on a normal horizontal keyboard with significantly less pain in my arms and shoulders.
I already owned a Moonlander keyboard with the tripod mounts, so a little playing around with Small Rig mount and I have my vertical keyboard, affectionately known as the Type Fighter.
To get to vertical I started with desk mounts that I could adjust and progressively increased the angle of the tilt. Eventually I joined the two halves with a 300mm straight rod. But I don't have the photos of that handy.
Also in the picture, my left handed trackball (Elecom) and my Logitech MX Vertical. I alternate the mousing hand regularly. (Trackball for big movements, mouse for fine detail and gaming).
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...
> She knew the Backstreet Boys & One Direction, but not Take That nor East 17
Not even Americans are likely to know who Take That and East 17 are. I'm a middle-aged American, university educated, have even lived abroad, and most in my circle of equally educated and well-traveled friends would consider particularly hip to cultural trends of the late 20th century.
I've literally never even heard of East 17, and I am vaguely aware of Take That being a band, but if you hadn't included them in the same sentence as BSB and 1D (whose members I cannot name except for Zane and Harry, plus there's an Irish guy??), I wouldn't have even clocked "oh yeah, that's a band I've heard mentioned a couple times in my life"
> 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.
Well, I'm French and it's the same for me. I think what Americans (and the British? I know Henry VIII is a king if England, even if I have no idea how many wives he could have had) greatly overestimate how shared their culture is in the western world.
Though living in Belgium I've noticed the Flemish are much more aware of such American things than we are, so maybe it's just the French who aren't well integrated into the "global western" culture.
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.
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.
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