I live in a smallish city, we have a lot of stores I can shop at and a Costco within a 30 minute drive. For me, incremental marginal cost of the delivery is negligible compared to me driving to a couple stores, not finding what I need, and still ordering online anyway. In general, I go to stores to get something that I know they have, not because they have "pallets of goods"
I love my Voron Trident. It might not be under $1000. I have about $1300 in it, I start with the Voron Tap tool head which added a bit plus other stuff.
We hired the guy who said it was a dump question, he became our manager. He then decided to retire and we had to replace him. One of the candidates answered the 5 cli question with terminal eye candy, not functional commands. He was not hired for the job.
> My experience differs a lot. Many insanely skilled people are somewhat "weird" (including possibly
I am actually a bit weird myself, so I can relate.
> What you consider to be "skilled people" is what I would rather call "skilled self-promoters". "Skilled people" and "skilled self-promoter" are quite different breeds of people.
I don't mean that they have told me that they are skilled, or that their resume has implied it. I mean that they actually have the skills. Self-promoters that don't know the information always look good on paper, but after a few minutes of talking to them you can tell that they don't quite match.
Before IT, I was a live sound engineer TV, theater, music. There was also a entertainment university starting up around the same time. They were pumping out tons of "trained" engineers that looked good on paper but couldn't mix for shit. I think we can blame them for the shitification of pop music.
I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing.
I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history.
I do have one technical question that started out as fun and quirky but has actually shown more value than expected. I call it the desert island cli.
What are your 5 linux cli desert island commands?
Having a hardware background, today, mine are: vi, lsof, netcat, glances, and I am blanking on a fifth. We have been doing a lot of terraform lately
I have had several interesting responses
Manager level candidate with 15+ years hands on experience. He thought it was a dumb question because it would never happen. He became the teams manager a few months after hiring. He was a great manager and we are friends.
Manager level to replace the dumb question manager. His were all Mac terminal eye candy. He did not get the job.
Senior level SRE hire with a software background. He only needed two emacs and a compiler, he could write anything else he needed.
In the 90s domain registration was all handled through email. You emailed from an approved address, with a specific format, to change anything about the registration. This included where your name servers were.
Made self-hosting interesting when your home IP changed, or you moved, and that was where you hosted your DNS and email.
We get our eggs from a specialty butcher, their meat prices are rather high. Their organic, locally sourced eggs are a good $4 cheaper than the big box groceries regular eggs.