I worked at a previous job for about 1.5 years with the engineer and had subjected her to what must have been a terrible interview back then. Timing worked in

I worked at a previous job for about 1.5 years with the engineer and had subjected her to what must have been a terrible interview back then. Timing worked in my favor - her contract wasn't renewed by the company she was working at when I got permission to hire two contractors. I had been staying in contact and gently recruiting her for a couple of months. She became unexpectedly available, she called me up and we brought her in immediately. I know a handful of great hackers and I've pretty much added her to the group. I was socially connected to the other person and knew he was smart and committed. I wasn't sure if his tech skills would be too rusty (he had been working on software outsourcing business development, working with overseas dev shops for an app outsourcer here), but I knew he'd work twice as hard as anybody else. Plus, he's the kind of guy who spent time learning Vietnamese when he was working with a Vietnamese software shop remotely. How can you doubt that someone willing to go that far just to make sure that communication is good? It's been a real win with him as well, he's picked up the medical research side of things much better than I have and has more than exceeded what I expected from a technical perspective. My role is a little weird. I am a tech guy (MS in CS) with a background in SQL hacking for the last few years (lots of low hanging fruit in the enterprise db world) with a side of presentation side stuff. I originally came into my role expecting to do pure db dev work, maybe some lightweight (tool-based) report dev occasionally. But then the two original team members all left the organization and I had to become kind of a de-facto admin/project manager/technical lead.