A year or two ago I read “Creative Selection,” a book that gives some insight into how Apple operated internally during the “golden age” of Steve Jobs. It’s a worthwhile read if you’re into that sort of thing, but one thing stuck with me that is relevant if you’re not: Apple’s demo culture. Many of the interactions described in the book center around demoing stuff to the Steve. Demos: visually showing what’s the state of affairs.

About a decade ago, a friend of mine, Nina (not her actual name), disappeared into a religious cult. Nina broke with her family in a pretty destructive way. After a few years, we heard she had had a child with a cult leader. Her parents never met their grandchild. Until well into my teenage years, once or twice per year we’d spend a long weekend with my dad’s study mates and their kids.

I needed a distraction, so a while ago I decided to spend a few hours learning React Native. React Native is an environment to build native mobile applications for multiple platforms at once, based on the popular React.js library. One thing really blew me away: I could edit some code, save the file and _in seconds_ the app my iPhone would update. Seconds. I remember Jeff Bezos once saying that he effectively lives in the future.

If you would have to make a hiring decision for an engineer based on just one attribute, what would it be? This is a question that was asked to me by a candidate during our recruitment process. That was a first. I’m involved, generally, in two steps in our interviewing process: the “people manager” round (where we try to get a sense of “soft skill” behavior, collaboration with others, previous company experience, growth potential) and the “management interview” round (for engineering management positions).

Should it be a company’s ambition to keep people forever? For my parents’ generation and before it was common to stay with a company for your whole career. In some cultures this is still the case. Things look quite differently now, so isn’t it time to re-evaluate if we should adapt our approach to how we position our company as an employer as a result? I remember reading an article where Richard Branson spoke about the millennial generation, and how to adapt to their “impatience” and “instant gratification” needs.