How many jobs have you had? You talked about the best and the worst. Can you comment on the relationship between (y-axis) quality of job and (x-axis) strength of personal connection before you joined. If you plotted a scatterplot, what relationship would you find?

I've changed jobs ten times since 1992. As it works out, exactly half of them I was recruited into by an internal reference and the other half I found on a job board like Monster or LinkedIn. By far, the two best were relatively large organizations that I applied to cold, and the two absolute worst were actually the ones I was most actively recruited into by former co-workers. I suspect that the problem in both of the latter cases was that they worked so hard to bring me in that they ended up overselling me - I'm good, but I'm also a human who has two kids to look after. On the other hand, if I'm "just" the best candidate from the pile of resumes, expectations seem to be reasonable.

hmm, I guess I can say a reasonably good one and the worst one ever that almost made me quit programming came about this way. The same guy recruited me in both places.