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A phone call I nearly ignored turned into over three years of work.
9am Sunday morning, two thousand and something. It had been a fun Saturday night, a late one. Unknown number calling. I was 50/50 on letting it ring out.
I answered. It was the other half of an accountant I knew. I didn't know him. I didn't know who he worked for either.
A social networking site, as it turned out. It had a critical CSS bug. The accountant had passed my details on and told him I was dependable.
I said I could help so I cycled to my wee office a couple of miles away and started digging. A big, complicated monolithic codebase I'd never seen before.
In the code, it was .Panel where it should have been .panel.
CSS class names are case sensitive. Nothing flagged the typo.
A couple of hours for one capital letter.
The client was ecstatic and paid me.
That fix led to more consulting, then a full-time job for a year or so. He came back again and again over the next twelve years. By last count, over three years of work in all.
No application form got me that. A referral did.
Hiring now is end of the world level shit on both sides.
Psychological evaluations, forms, AI interviews, coding tests and take-home assignments on one side. A pile of identical AI-written applications on the other. Some of it before anyone's even spoken to a human.
A referral is a warm lead. It gets you past the robots at the door.
It doesn't find the capital P for you.
If you're hiring and someone you trust vouches for a person, listen. That word is worth more than the form. Somebody vouched for me once and I'm always doing my best to pay it forward.