adrianhoward

Say no…

" yet interestingly enough they are the MOST demanding when it comes to support and feature requests."

… because of this ;-) If you have happy customers at the higher price point I'd be investing my time trying to find more folk like those — unless you think that a lower price point is going to give you a much, much larger market.

" would I tell them that they might not be a good fit in a polite way?"

I dunno what & how you're selling — so hard to say. Me — I'd lean towards just saying "Sorry, no. We have a standard pricing structure for all clients." If you're offering just monthly pricing maybe offer them an annual plan with 12months for 11months of money. That would at least help cashflow.

At the low end when eating out in restaurants occasionally having wait staff ignore him and asking other folk at the table "what would he like", or people assuming that he couldn't hear and talking about him — to at the high end having a guy shouting "deaf fuck" at him repeatedly on the street for no obvious reason.

I'm not trying to say that this happened every day — especially the outright insults. But it was enough to be noticeable.

I suspect, as @hibbelig commented, age had something to do with it.

This may also be a sign that the hearing aid wasn't fitted properly — or the shape of your father's ear has changed a bit since it was fitted. Poor fit makes it much more likely for this to happen (coz speaker and mike have a more open channel between 'em, and more ambient noise gets in so folk turn 'em up more). (My dad has similar problems until he got a new ear canal mould taken.)

It may also be a sign that you're dad's hearing loss has changed since the hearing aid was chosen and he needs it adjusting, or a different type.

Feedback is usually a sign that something needs fixing ;-)

You suspect wrongly. Having seen the attitudes to my father change when he wore one. Ranging from outright verbal abuse, to assumptions of stupidity & senility.

As for what I did during the crash — started my own web/usability company in 2000. Nothing to do with the crash (the company I left was successful and bought a few years later — would have made a lot more money if I'd stayed and waited for my stock to vest ;-) Just wanted to get out of management at the time.

Just because the VC / startup market was crashing and burning didn't mean that a whole stack of existing companies didn't want to get on the web at that time ;-)

From my perspective a lot of it depended on where you lived.

The folk I know who were working in the US at the time didn't really notice a lot of difference if they weren't in the valley or NYC. Because outside of those areas the crash didn't cause that large a change in the job market. In the UK (where I live) not a lot changed outside of London, and maybe Brighton.

If you were in SF or London though you were facing a lot of skilled people hitting the streets at roughly the same time. Which obviously drove wages down. For a time it was a employers market.

For me the biggest visible changes I saw were:

* on the bright side: far fewer idiots were hired

* on the dark side: far fewer newbies were hired and trained on the job

* I got fewer calls trying to poach me, and lower offers for London jobs

* I faced a lot of competition from other folk starting their own agencies after leaving a failing startup

The biggest problem was faced by complete newbies or folk still finding their feet — since there were far more experienced folk around in the job market. And they got hired first.

Advice for developers who want to insulate themselves:

* If you're working now save money. Money gives you options.

* Be good at your job.

* Understand how to communicate to third parties that you are good at your job.

* Stop thinking that all work outside of the non-VC funded world is dull an uninteresting. It isn't.

* Have connections outside of the startup echo chamber.

* Live, or be willing to move to, locations that aren't flooded by hundreds of people just like you.

I'm not directly in the publishing industry, but I've been a technical reviewer on several books and have a fair number of friends who are authors/editors - mostly in the non-fiction market.

From what I've experienced those publisher profit numbers don't make sense.

Let's assume 5% author royalties (which, in my experience, is the low end 5-15% is the normal range, upper end for track record very successful folk — more for some publishers in some contexts), so that $10k = $200,000 total sales for the book.

Typically the publisher will take around 45-55% of that $200k (including what they pass onto the author). The rest will go to distributers & retailers. Let's take the upper end of that.

So 55% of $200l = $110000 to the publisher.

- the author royalties = $100k - 10% printing costs = $90k - 15%ish for pre-production = $75k

So absolute best case it's more like $10k vs $75k. Then there's marketing, the fact that most authors don't earn out their advance, the shenanigans over book discount, etc. So the profit to publishers coming out of that is often significantly lower.

See http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost... and http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-... for some examples of real world publisher cost breakdowns.

(The slice taken by marketing in the first example above seems high from what others have told me. Its also a somewhat simplistic breakdown since it ignores some of the long-term costs from publishers that aren't related to "books" directly. e.g. the advances to authors who never get published, etc. - so the potential publisher profits aren't quite as large as they appear here - there's other overhead outside the printing/distributing/selling books bit)

It's also something Charlie Stross has posted about a fair bit see this collection of posts http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

"Now compare to people like Brennan Dunn who have made $100'000 or more from their books, by publishing online and capturing 90%+ of revenue. You don't need a publisher for distribution. You don't need a publisher for typesetting. If you need an editor or proof reader you can hire one for maybe $10K."

That's the best-case success case. Which is nice. But not common. Almost everybody I know who has gone the self-publishing route has ended up with the high-hundreds and single-digit-thousands.

They'd have got more from a publisher advance. They'd have also learned a lot more about how to write a good book from the publishers — since they're in the business of helping their authors be profitable.

Is a traditional publisher the right route for everybody. No. But neither are they the rapacious idiots who are exploiting authors that some folk portray them as. Almost everybody I know who went the traditional publisher route felt they got value out of it. Many of them are more than technically literate enough to go the self publishing route if they had wanted to (and some of them have for other kinds of product/market).

++$lots to this. Helping and teaching others is a stupidly effective technique to understand things better yourself.

2) Write lots of code.

3) Repeat.

I'd go as far as saying that is what you should optimise conference attendance for.

I learn a lot from attending conferences. But it's mostly from the conversations I have with people, not from watching the sessions.

The opportunity to meet and spend time with really smart people is worth way more to me than sitting and watching talks.

When I first started going to conferences I used to spend a lot of time agonising over which session to go to at multi-track events.

These days I optimise my time for talking to smart folk I'd rarely get the opportunity to spend time with otherwise. Both speakers and attendees. I'd rather continue that hallway conversation and learn something new, than go along to the talk that I can often catch up on later.

It's a really tough call. I've been wrong (and right ;-) multiple times going down either path.

The last time I had to make that sort of choice we went the set-based design / real options path and developed both in parallel for as long as we could. More expensive, but lower risk. I'm glad we did coz the decision we made four months in on which one to drop wasn't the one we would have made at the start.

Not the person you aimed the question at, but…

I worked as a volunteer counsellor for a few years in my twenties. Some of the stuff I encountered during those years was folk who were going through horrific, long-term abuse.

One of the patterns that you notice is that abusers go to a lot of effort at times to show that their behaviour as normal. Both as a tool to justify it to themselves (this is normal — everybody does it — I'm not a bad person or doing anything bad), and as a tool to further control the abused (this is normal — this is what you should expect — you won't get any better elsewhere).

Anecdotally the ones who can find or create an active "community" of abusers — where two best friends both hit their partners and acknowledge it to each other, where everybody in an extended family beats on their kids, etc. — the abuse is worse because there is little or no sense of shame in what's done.

It's normal.

Now this was the 90s. Before subreddits were around. But this is why it bothers me. Yes, it's just words. But those words are probably making the lives of other people worse.

Hmmm… I thought that the point being made there wasn't so much the serialisation, but the delivery mechanism. The newspaper then, and the television now, is in everybody's home. It's not something special that needs seeking out.

What I meant, and expressed poorly, was that dev-ish folk tend to not have some of practices in their toolbox that you can use to validate cheaply (e.g. by knowing how to assess markets well, or knowing how to interview potential customers in a non-directive way, or indeed the ability to talk to customers at all, etc).

We also have a tendency to want to build things because, y'know, that's what we do ;-) We also tend to want to build things really, really well for that awesome future place where we have millions of users. So we over-engineer for where we are now, and the learning we need now.

Because of both of these issues I think folk with a dev background find themselves in a position where VC is the only route forward — when if they'd taken a different approach earlier on they could have continued bootstrapping and avoided VC money until later / forever.

Does that make sense?

(and by curious coincidence one of the authors of this piece, Ben du Boulay used to be my boss many moons ago ;-)

I did, but I've no idea how common that is. I had a fairly bad drinking problem in my early 20s. Very much the functional alcoholic. Once I kicked that (with a year or so of pretty close to abstinence — through personal choice, no programme) I went back to social drinking fine. Not had a problem since, which is about 20 odd years now.

I have a few rules of thumb (I generally don't have alcohol in the house past a decent bottle of whisky every month or so, and I don't drink alone) but sticking to them has never been hard, and the times I don't stick to 'em haven't cause a relapse and slide into doom.

You can't — obviously. And folk like Amy Hoy @patio11 freely admit that.

The key word there though is "requires". I've encountered lots of companies that have spent silly amounts of money, often their investors money, because they've missed opportunities to validate their business model in cheaper ways. Either because they don't know how or they don't want to. Folk who are so focussed on the vision that their aiming for that they fail to look down as they walk over a cliff.

To stereotype slightly I'd say that folk with a dev background are more likely to go that route than not — since the business / marketing / user research end of the skill spectrum that can help with that stuff is less familiar to them.

Nothing against VC funding, and it's absolutely necessary for some companies. It's just that the majority of folk that I see trying for it are doing so before it is actually required. Either because they're missing ways they can continue more economically because they lack the skills, or they hope that the (lack of) positive feedback that they're getting so far will be solved by money.

Other way round… other way round ;-)

To be honest — I don't see that mistake much any more. Indeed I'm generally much more upbeat about the current state of testing that the author of this article seems to be.

The thing that strikes me most about testing is how much the profession and practice has changed over the last twenty years. All for the better.

In the 90's and early 00's it was very much as the article says. Seen as something for larger organisations only. Generally something done by a separate person or team alone. Almost never something integrated with ongoing development work (those ghastly integration sessions that took weeks and months… shudder…). Almost never something that developers were involved with themselves — which led to some god awful code coming out the end of the sausage machine. Testers were generally seen as folk who couldn't hack programming. And there were an awful lot of folk that I encountered with a testing job title in those years who were bloody awful at their job — who were basically human automated tests running through checklists and providing relatively little value to the organisation.

These days every language has half a dozen test frameworks, supporting different styles of automated testing. Knowledge of testing at some level is expected of developers.. Anybody but the rankest newbie should be able to discuss it — even then I'd be pretty shocked if even the freshest of faces didn't at least have an opinion and knowledge on the topic. Almost every codebase that I interact with will have some kind of automated test suite. Often really excellent ones. Testing is integrated into the development process rather than being a separate phase. Because of this a huge number of the dumb errors that the checklist-style tester had to catch are now caught by machines. Which has freed up the professional tester to spend their efforts on the hard problems. You get so much more value out of testers these days because they're spending their time coming up with evil edge cases, isolating those bastard intermittent issues, or feeding back a metric shed load of issues from sessions of exploratory testing. Stuff they never had the time to do when they were dealing with the errors that the devs should have caught themselves.

Don't get me wrong. I still encounter teams that really, really need a specialist tester but don't realise it. I still encounter teams that could be way, way better at automated testing than they could be and their shipping problems show it. The testing profession is currently having to deal with the idiocy that is ISO (see http://commonsensetesting.org/stop29119/OpenLetter/).

Life's not perfect.

But compared to 20 years ago — the state of testing is good!

On the Java side, if that's the route you wanna go, consider getting the stuff from http://teachingkidsprogramming.org/. Llewellyn Falco took me through some of it at a conference a few years back and it looked pretty nice.

(Disclaimer: Not a Java person, no kids, but have geek-friends-with-kids ;-).

(Disclaimer: One of the authors is a friend so I may be a bit biased, but we did first encounter each other on discussions about accessibility in the 90's ;-)

The technical advice in it is mostly written for web folk, but the framework of accessibility/UX it places that advice in is pretty much applicable to anything.

Bill and I talked about branding a bit after my talk last year and I think we were in broad agreement — but his content background means he has a much better grasp of it at that end. Bill's a lovely chap (@writebeard on twitter) and will be happy to answer questions I'm sure. You might also find his video from this years Lean UX NYC of interest — but it's more on the content side https://vimeo.com/94016584

I'm not really a "brand" person (I'm about 50/50 dev & UX) — my talk was really more about my experiences of what worked and didn't work rather than a manifesto or process. My broad points were:

* Busting the common misconception that "branding" was just about visual aspects (logo, style guide, etc.)

* That brand was an expression/aspect of product/market fit

* That rebranding is a kind of pivot.

* The large ad agency model of how to develop brands don't work with lean startup environments coz they're used to be being brought in to sell existing products where p/m fit is, to a large extent, already set. When it comes to p/m fit the Mad Men are on the green of the 18th hole. The branding folk for startups are still driving to the golf course and think they're playing cricket.

* That there are a whole bunch of folk in the branding/marketing world who have been saying smart things about the relationship between product, market and brand — and we should be making friends with them and paying attention.

* That bringing in branding/marketing folk early on makes sense and thinking of your brand as something that evolves and needs to be tested is a sensible approach.

Like I said though. I don't class myself as an expert on the brand stuff ;-)

* The upcoming book on branding in the O'Reilly "Lean" series http://www.leanbranding.com/

* Bill Beard has been doing some thinking / workshops about the topic. There are some links to his talks on http://www.writebeard.com/

* My session from Lean UX NYC last year http://www.slideshare.net/adrianh/leanuxnyc-leanbranding (probably doesn't make any sense without me rambling in front of it ;-)

Being a… tad… older than twenty years this is just nonsense. Unless you redefine any successful author — or author that receives payment — as, by definition, not writing literature.

The old one did get rebooted as http://www.brightjourney.com/ - but since they never clarified their content licensing http://www.brightjourney.com/q/licence-user-generated-conten... I never tracked it.