I love the secretary test! Our CEO at Lucidchart used to sit right at the front door (best natural light) and it was always funny to watch how potential hires would interact with him. The smart ones recognize his face and immediately engage, and others don't say anything on the way in or out. Who doesn't visit the website of their potential employer and at least read up about the management team? Especially when at the time it was a startup of 10 people!
Haha, close. We are actually in Salt Lake City. But yes, definite intentional inclusion of mountains. We actually had a business partner in town this week and he enjoyed some business on the ski slopes. And it isn't uncommon for a few employees to go missing on morning with fresh powder :)
We ran into this dilemma last year at Lucidchart when we were debating how to handle SEO, PR, and general marketing. We flirted with outsourcing but eventually hired two full-timers and we haven't looked back. Took a month or two to get them up to speed on the product and best practices but I now glean off of their expertise and having them in-house makes our team stronger.
The only thing we would outsource is very quantifiable deliverables that need no additional maintenance to be valuable. Ie. data entry, template designs, link building.
I haven't read the book but I worked in DC during bailout and sat in on the Senate hearings with all three of these rating agencies. I tell ya, Hank Paulson was much more confident during the meltdown than the head of each agency. I'm not surprised these guys are under the gun, they've playing stupid and deserve this suit.
I've already heard comments about quality going down. I feel like once H&M started blowing up their quality declined. Not saying it was the highest quality to begin with but my older H&M hold up better than my newer purchases. Zara is destined for the same dilemma.