Last week I had lunch with someone who wanted to work under a contract arrangement through Cogent Consulting. You could notionally call the meeting an interview, but you'd be using the term loosely. You see, Steve had spent over a year working with them at a previous organisation. There was no technical information I could figure out from that meeting that was going to be more useful than the experience Steve had had working with them. That left me with one main task - to figure out whether the culture fit was ok.

About 45 minutes into lunch after we'd all been chatting about various topics, I turned to Steve and said "well - my dickhead-ometer hasn't gone off, so he's ok by me". And that was how our latest Cogent staff member joined us.