I believe that if you are putting a language there when every other language is newer by 5 years like python 3.9 you should just omit that language or put the effort of doing properly. Otherwise is spreading misinformation, you know how many people is sharing this link saying "oh python is so slow omfg" because of this article? it's a little bit irresponsible.
weel it's a bad idea unless you update just one package that doesn't have too many shared dependencies, things gets complicated with shared dependencies across their packages, so that's why it's better to run the full -Syu of course not automated but when you know what you are upgrading and possible manual interventions (if any) or caveats that you might have with the changes.
Those were the errors I made for a project I was a consultant/freelancer:
- Not charging the right price per hour, because "I was starting, this was an opportunity".
- Not putting boundaries on client limits, as in, "no you can't call me whenever you want" (especially if you live in a different timezone) I personally understand they need to have an answer, but they can do perfectly fine by e-mail and you'll have to set to them a deadline for replies, for example "I will call/or reply you as soon as I get the e-mail" on the contract.
- I didn't bill them for every cost they make me do like travel meetings and other general costs, so at the end my profits were even low.
- I didn't had a contract, that was completely solid, so, get a lawyer who can draft you a solid contract with all your needs.
- I was so overswamp of work that I couldn't manage all the expenses, or other time that I didn't bill to them, so also, get an accountant if you are charging them with something that might be funky.
Well, after Guy #1 left the company I met a former colleague of him on other company, and she told me "why you didn't call us? we would advise you to not hire this guy!" so that's where my assumption came from, you're right, there are probably people that will hide the truth just to be diplomatic.
Well, those meetings were useless, but as I said first he just wanted to trash talk about other people (he wasn't calling for attention to show me work, I used to sync up with him about work frequently), and those meetings even useless were much important than listening crap like .. "I couldn't connect all the day to the network, somebody banned my mac address" (that wasn't true of course, he just had issues on his environment but instead of think of that, he was paranoid about someone on the team hacking him or something)
In my case when I've regretted it was much because the "attitude problem". For a team of 10 devs (I've recruited all of them), I remember two specifically cases in which I regretted to hire those guys.
Guy #1:
A "developer" who was trash talking everyone (even me) and then he pretended he didn't do it or he alleged "I didn't say that", he complained about every one of his teammates, he pretended and believes that he was a workaholic (but he failed to be on call when the shit hits the fan). In his very last days at the company, he was harassing me to give him attention I was swamped of work and attending useless meetings and I couldn't give him much attention, so he started sending me whatsapp messages and e-mails at ridiculous hours and complaining because "I didn't reply his messages", this guy has some issues IMO.
Guy #2:
A brilliant student (almost summa cum laude in a recognized university), he was hired for built a parser for several input formats, he needed several meetings for understanding the problem, he was complaining about technical decisions so he bring more people to the meetings and he got the same result, as a developer he's the guy with the ugliest practices that I've seen in my life, he overengineered everything, he used lot of irrelevant algorithms for solving silly problems, once I asked to do a silly cronjob to fetch from an API the exchange rates of 8 different countries and cache them, so he did build a nodejs app (I asked him to do this in python) that didn't what I wanted (he built a webservice that given two currencies find the rate), a script of 10 lines max, he did 400 ugly js lines, but the worst is that those 400 lines were useless for what we wanted to achieve..
My advice when hiring please don't be desperate (guy #2) and always check his background with their previous employers (guy #1).
With the other 8 guys, I was ok, even if couple of them weren't 100% perfect (I could add couple of more guys of this team but they weren't so bad) overall I felt great with the team.