Joel Spolsky wrote a great article on Software Dominance and Microsoft. Look at this chart of revenues for 2001.
Top Annual Revenue of Software Companies, 2001
Interestingly, Joel Spolsky wrote the table showing this data in
Microsoft Word
I haven’t read Clay Shirky in a while. In the Music Industry and the Big Flip, Shirky writes
This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the old notion of “filter, then publish” is giving way to “publish, then filter.” There is no need for Slashdot’s or Kuro5hin’s owners to sort the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop to pressure people not to post drivel, because lightweight filters applied after the fact work better at large scale than paying editors to enforce minimum quality in advance. A side-effect of the Big Flip is that the division between amateur and professional turns into a spectrum, giving us a world where unpaid writers are discussed side-by-side with New York Times columnists.
Shirky on micropayment systems:
In particular, users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments, meanwhile, waste the users’ mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions. Micropayments thus create in the mind of the user both anxiety and confusion, characteristics that users have not heretofore been known to actively seek out.
Steven Johnson wrote a fascinating article on google’s shortcomings. He writes:
If you’re searching for something that can be sold online, Google’s top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information.
. I can vouch for that. For the longest time, the number one search result for my own name was my Amazon reviewer page. Useful, yes, but ultimately not important.
Great article by Dave Weinberger on why panels at conferences are silly and awful. My complaint is a little different. There never is enough time for each panelist to say what they really want to say, so they end up starting a big thought when BZZZZZZZZZ! Time’s up, and now the next person must speak.
Here’s what panels are good for: answering questions from the audience. When only one person is presenting, that presenter (with the authority that comes with standing before the podium) gives The Answer that audience members are supposed to write down. When an audience member poses a question to a panel, it become apparent that there is no Answer, that several qualified people can have honest differences of opinion.
I wrote an article with a similiar tone, Are Meetings Productive?
This article talks about the new trend of companies paying for e-learning of workers they have to lay off. Laid off workers are entitled to vouchers to obtain ?elearning? through a certain vendor. The idea makes perfect sense, and it can do a lot to reassure worried employees that they will be ?taken care of? in the event of layoff. Access to training material and forums is a big obstacle for workers trying to make their skill sets more marketable. And it?s probably a cheap fringe benefit. Decent subscriptions to online learning sites can cost $200 yearly or less, and even if corporations have to pay ? a la carte,? chances are that a lot of workers won?t use up their full elearning credit. Plus, some corporations are entitled to discounts to elearning firms.
It?s funny. When I look at my employment situation, I look at the problem as a skillset problem and not a problem of failing to pound the pavement. Perhaps this is merely a characteristic of the IT industry, but in this day and age, finding employers and jobs is pretty easy (although developing a personal network of contacts still is as hard as it has ever been). The real challenge is ?keeping up? and anticipating new needs. Even workers with good jobs can find themselves becoming specialized in one particular technology that is no longer hot when they need to look for work again. The skillset problem is particularly a problem in the technical documentation industry. There are so many new content areas and publishing tools and programming methods that it is humanly impossible to keep up with it.
That leads to the other question of how to choose what technical skills to acquire. It’s perfectly okay to become proficient in commercial tools (that is, when evaluation versions are available), but should a person in documentation spend a lot of time learning Framemaker when other companies are using Robohelp or Arbortext or nothing that all? The catch-22 is that the IT industry values depth of knowledge instead of breadth, and especially depth in one particular technology. But if the individual has depth in a different technology, well you can just forget it. The job seeker can acquire this one skill, but why? Shouldn?t the job seeker be acquiring general knowledge instead of specialized knowledge? Should a singer learn the state song of Georgia if he lives in Texas? Yes, there is the possibility of getting a gig in Georgia, but there are 49 other state songs to learn as well. So should the singer be learning 50 different songs? Or should the singer be doing voice exercises, singing in different styles and improving breathing techniques?
I?ve spent the last day or so doing online job searches. I had done it two years ago with some success, and thought I had mastered it. Since that time, all the job search services have undergone several facelifts and are more aggressively pushing their services (an all-too understandable occurrence in this competitive world).
While Monster.com has the most elaborate job search site, it really doesn?t have as many listings as headhunter.net. Headhunter is affiliated with yahoo as well as the local Austin newspaper. Headhunter has a much easier interface and allows you to cut and paste resumes, something which Monster unwisely abandoned a year ago. Monster requires that you use their template. The template is not bad, but it forces you to quantify your experience into years and your salary requirements. That is convenient for employers wanting to filter their applicant pool, but ludicrous otherwise. What matters is not how many years you?ve been doing something, but how good you are at doing it. This emphasis on years of experience rewards people who have only one skill but have been doing it forever. As far as minimum salary, I usually put $15,000 (or whatever minimum amount the database allows). Remember the purpose is to make your resume visible on job searches, not to negotiate salary. I must use this simple search query to find 90% of my job leads.
Headhunter is nice, but it has a crazy rule that resumes or cover letters cannot contain url?s. It?s rather easy to work around it (I just substituted ?http://? for hXXp://?), but I marvel at the inanity of it. Why on earth would a internet recruiting company want to prevent employers from viewing other resumes you have online?
One problem I noticed with most job searches is that they don?t allow you to limit your search to certain regions. Or they allow you to specify only one or two industries rather than several. Interestingly, rather than concocting several crazy database queries by cities, I usually end up searching the whole USA and just follow the ones in places that interest me. (i.e., Austin, Washington DC, Denver, Portland, Houston, Madison and San Antonio, in order of preference).
One problem with these sites is how they determine the freshness of a resume. Resumes from search results appear newest first, so there is value to updating or renewing them frequently. But that is tedious. It never is really clear what is the best way to submit your resume and cover?via Headhunter, the company?s own online job application or the email address of the contact person. And how do they treat attachments? I?ve gotten in the habit of putting url?s to my resume instead; not only does it avoid the problem of attachments being lost, it allows employers to view the most current resume available.
My favorite site is Austin Job Hunt, which lists links to all the local IT companies. The google newsgroups would seem to be the obvious place to find jobs, but actually they aren?t too busy; Perhaps human resource departments have concerns about privacy, but there?s no beating the price.
These job search tools are marvelous, but they demand a level of technical competence just to use them. Have we finally reached a point where making Boolean searches is as vital a life skill as cooking or driving a car?