The Most Competent Person I Ever Hired
September 1, 2026
The best hire I made in thirty-three years produced no story. The resume was accurate, the interview matched it, the background matched the interview, and the work matched all three.
Category: Technology (Page 3)
BusinessA Client I Kept Running Got Me a Twenty-Year Job
September 1, 2026
The best job I ever had came from doing unglamorous maintenance work well for somebody who was watching without either of us thinking about it. No application, no resume, no search.
BusinessYou Will Never Get Everyone to Agree
September 1, 2026
Every transformation vendor sells alignment, and alignment is not for sale. I ran a company off paper and onto computers with hundreds of people across every department wanting different things, and no version of that project existed where everyone was…
BusinessI Spent Weeks Debugging Code That Should Have Been Deleted
September 1, 2026
If your team has been stuck on the same problem for more than a few days, the fastest fix is usually to delete the work and start over, and almost nobody does it. I lost weeks to a bug that…
BusinessWe Built Fraud Detection Before Anyone Called It AI
September 1, 2026
Before you buy AI-branded anomaly detection, ask the vendor one question: what does it compute? If the answer is a baseline and a deviation from that baseline, you are buying a method that has worked since long before anyone put…
BusinessOne Program, Any Number of Customers
September 1, 2026
Software that keeps customer rules in code has a ceiling, and you find the ceiling at the worst possible time. Software that keeps them in a table has no ceiling at all.
BusinessI Hired Someone Who Had Never Written a Line of the Language
September 1, 2026
A resume and an interview tell you what someone says they can do. Neither one tells you what they can do. I found that out as a new manager with a vice president title and no interview training, on a…
BusinessThey Hired Us to Settle an Argument, Not to Answer a Question
September 1, 2026
Before you commission a technical assessment, find out what decision it is going to be used in. Honest engineers doing honest work can still produce a report that exists to strengthen somebody's position in a negotiation, and the outcome will…
BusinessYour Email Is Not an Archive
August 29, 2026
One of my techs emptied a user's trash bin to free disk space. She had been storing tens of thousands of legal and accounting documents in there because it saved her clicks. Nothing was recoverable, and a disabled Google account…
GhostwritingNumber Two on the List
August 28, 2026
A client told me I came up second on the list an AI engine gave him. He hired me anyway. That detail explains how buyers find professionals now, and why a book is the strongest record you can create.
BusinessThe Client Sent Us the Wrong Source Code
August 27, 2026
Asking for something is not the same as verifying you got it, and the gap between those two costs more project time than any other mistake I have watched. We asked a client for their source code. They sent it.…
BusinessThe Water Kept Flowing When Nobody Was Watching
August 26, 2026
One question will tell you whether your AI agent project is going to work, and it takes an afternoon to answer. The question is not what the agent can do. It is what the agent is allowed to do when…