A woman recently posted in a Facebook authors’ group I’m a part of that she was rejected after submitting her series to a publisher. She wrote, “It was an audiobook company who said my sales aren’t enough for them to be successful. What stung the most was when she said, ‘you just released your fifth […]
Business
Professional Dungeon Masters
There’s been a new trend in role-playing games (RPG): professional dungeon masters, who are people that run role-playing games for money. With RPGs, the dungeon master (DM) does quite a bit more work than the other players. They need to understand the system better than anyone else playing, design the adventure, keep track of the […]
Machine Learning Is The New MBA
Years ago businesses noticed that graduates from Masters of Business Administration (MBA) programs had a toolset that was unusual and useful. These graduate programs were producing people distinct from general undergraduate business programs, in that they had a good understanding of general business principles applicable throughout an organization, combined with analytical techniques that could be […]
Many Software Developers Are Underpaid
Young people are flooding into computer science programs. Working as a software developer, or tech worker generally, is seen as an easy path to a high salary. In spite of this, it’s clear that above-average software developers are underpaid compared to the value they bring to organizations. The range in productivity of developers is HUGE. […]
Monetizing Communities
I’ve been a member of online communities since before most people had heard of the internet. Before internet access had reached the masses, bulletin board systems (BBSes) allowed computers to connect, one-on-one, and form local, small versions of what we’re all now apart of. One element of this has been the evolution of online communities, […]
Website Visitors
When you’re getting started with something, having a metric to measure your progress is important. At the lowest possible level, just your time devoted to the activity can work, but it’s better if you can manage a more sophisticated measurement than that. I’ve been trying to write commercially, and the ultimate measurement for that is […]
Salaries Need To Be Part Of Job Postings
There’s been a disturbing trend in recent years that employers will post positions they want to hire someone for and omit the salary. This evolved into what is now, distressingly common, where they ask an employee their expected salary as part of the initial application. This needs to end. Why They Do It The reason […]
Recruiter Spam is a Waste of Everyone’s Time
Like many technical people, I regularly get e-mails from FAANG (Facebook Amazon Apple Netflix Google) recruiters starting “Your experience as a developer combined with your educational background could help us tackle some of our tallest tasks…” Without fail, the gist of the message is that they have a job posting that they want me to […]
The Problem With Online Discussion Forums
I’ve been a part of online communities for around 3 decades. Before I got onto the Internet, I was on BBSes (kind of mini, proto internets where typically 2 computers would talk to one another at a time). Discussion forums have been around since these olden times, from messages forums on BBSes, to Usenet, to […]