When I interviewed with Brian Knight, he handed me his laptop and said "Write me a query to do such-and-such." The SQL Server instance had been corrupted. There was no way any query was going to be executed in that instance. I started running down the issue and found a good symptom in a few minutes.

Brian watched the whole time, not saying much. He wanted to see what I would do. That's about the best interview technique I've seen - it came as close as anything to allowing him to watch me think.

While this worked out well for me, there are no silver-bullet shortcuts I'm aware of in 2009. I agree with Steve - you can make money if you have one.

Nowadays, as a manager, I balance my time between identifying team members' strengths and aligning assignments accordingly; and identifying obstacles and weaknesses, and helping them overcome them.

:{> Andy