Crepes, Hungarian style

or as we call them, palacsinta.

3/4 cup regular flour
1/4 cup gluten
1 egg
~1 cup milk
~ 1 cup soda water

Mix flour, gluten and egg. This mix will still be quite dry.
Add milk slowly, while stirring. The goal is to get to a smooth, but fairly thick consistency. The batter should flow, but slowly, like a thick paint.

Let sit until you are ready to go.

Stir up the batter in case it's settled. We always want to keep it nice and smooth. Now add soda water, while mixing, until the batter is quite runny. It should be runnier than oil.

Place a thin skillet/griddle on medium-high heat. The ideal temperature should be right around the smoke point of olive oil. When you add a half teaspoon of oil you should see some smoking. Ladle in some batter, maybe 100mL? Tilt the griddle this way and that to let the batter spread. Once the batter cooks and comes unstuck from the griddle (~20 seconds?) give it a flip. Let finish for about 10 more seconds. The first side will be goldened, the latter should have small charred spots.

Add sugar, jam, cinnamon, whipped cream, or whatever else you like asap while it's still hot. Roll up and stick a fork in it.

Perfection!

Cycling out the bottom

Microsoft's performance model has made the news a number of times. Recently, there was the perception that those getting the lowest reviews are insta-fired. I'm certain this isn't completely true, but there's some validity to the statement. This, of course, pisses off the "all-star degenerate case" supporters. In reality such teams don't really exist, but let's say, for the sake of argument, that everyone on the team is really good, and the bottom guy out of, say, 30, gets axed and replaced.

Naturally this sucks for the last-place really good guy. He needs to go find a new job. But remember, he's really good, right? So he should have no problem, really. Unless he's not, in which case perhaps the replacing was warranted.

Let's consider this from the company's standpoint.
There's really no way to grade/verify 'absolute ability'. In fact, this is a ridiculous concept. You can have a collection of very good engineers, generally speaking, but their relative strength will depend on the particular projects/work the company does. They have no other alternative than to stack them by "what impact do they provide me". Even if you could assign an absolute score, you can't just say "everyone over 85 stays" because you may not be able to get enough 85s, or you can find them in droves.

Consider a football team. There are 53 guys on the roster, the last 10 or so of whom are consistently in flux. These guys are all elite players on an absolute scale, but the bottom 10 don't make nearly the same impact as the top set, or are limited in up-side. It's clear that roughly that level of quality is easy to find. Since these bottom 10 guys aren't making an impact, your odds are better by taking a shot at someone else. Based on your demonstrated hiring ability, the replacements should be at least about as good and there's a chance they'll be better. And no fan has an issue with this because football's all about results.

Now back to Microsoft. They have a demonstrated ability to screen hires to a level where 29 engineers are better than the worst 1 (this is simple math, but putting it this way proves that 97% of their hires are better than the guy about to get fired). So they let one guy go, and have a 97% chance of replacing them with someone better. And oh yeah, Microsoft (and every other company) should be (and is) all about results. Why should this be different than football?

The real trick is to find the proportion to let go each year, based on the rate of hiring and growth.

The All-Star engineer squad

Hey you, get a team of 20 people to work on the next great piece of software. You want the 20 best people you can find, right?

I don't think so.

Given a project of sufficient size, there will always be areas that "just need to get done" and have relatively straight-forward solutions. It's best to have people who don't wish to be the top dog on these: they will do solid work, not cause turmoil with egotistical design discussions, and simply just get things working.

The simple truth is: there isn't enough interesting/novel stuff to go around to warrant an All-Star at every spot.

Voting combine

The NFL draft is one of my favorite events of the year. For those unfamiliar, it's where NFL teams pick from former college players. Before the draft is the NFL Combine: a battery of tests performed on the top 80-90% of players most likely to be selected in the draft. Independent testing provides physical attributes (height, weight, wingspan, etc), physical skill measurements (40 yard dash, vertical jump, etc) and a medical evaluation. Most of the press goes to the first two groups of data, but the teams care most about the latter (because they watch hours of tape on players, so the actual numbers from these tests aren't all that meaningful). Sometimes an otherwise highly ranked prospect has an unknown chronic medical issue, or gets busted by a drug test, or is just in the process of healing from a known surgery/injury and that progress is evaluated. Teams can then factor in this data when deciding if a player is worth an early pick.

Occasionally in presidential campaigns, a candidate's health comes up as an issue (is Ron Paul too old? is McCain too old? is Chris Christie too fat?). Perhaps we need a congressional combine (or call it something else ... ). Candidates would be tested by an independent panel on awareness of facts around current talking points, given a test to establish roughly where they fall on the political spectrum and given physicals and assigned a health risk score on some scale (from "totally fine" to "imminent risk of blown pupil"). This would go into their portfolio of data along with their observed behavior and voters can decide who to back based on slightly more complete and less manipulated information.