mostlyghostly

https://statscalculator.com/

Side project I made after leaving a large company; a free statistics package that bridges the gap between Excel and actual coding (R, Python). In the corporate world we used Minitab or a similar package with an expensive enterprise license.

Once I moved to a smaller one and was doing analytics on the side, I didn't have the budget for such things so.... I made my own version...

Never really had the time to build out a full set of features or promote it. We probably could have grabbed a piece of low-rent district for analytics software.

Empirically, I'm getting about the same results from my 1 page and my 2 page CV, based on call back rates, funnel progression, and interviewer comments. Go ahead and use two pages if the incremental content is relevant to your overall pitch.

(In my case the extra material is relevant... I've run pricing at five companies, which is usually a massively cross-functional job. Unlike my typical competitor, I've also mastered most of the supporting technical, accounting, and commercial disciplines... which makes me a one stop shop for serious pricing problems.)

My recruiter invites have been dropping at a exponential rate once I passed age 45. LinkedIn is apparently a fairly efficient platform for age discrimination.

Yes and No.

Most paintings don't have (much) value. Behold my latest work, the brown ring of quality... do I hear... 5 cents?

A few paintings have value, primarily due to the fame of the artist or the history of the piece (It hung <place>). Supply is frequently capped by the fact the artist is dead...

Simple English Translation: We cannot trust any publicly posted claims about product performance, since they have effectively been cherry-picked by the marketing / legal team.

Bad claims can be take down, thus the only remaining claims are good ones.

Cool - can anyone provide a quick list of alternatives?

And most of these tests are basically bullshit, in terms of real world impact.

What's the contest here? Who's most desperate, most willing to sacrifice their life and health for pennies on the dollar?

Seriously. I'm a middle aged guy with kids and parents to take care of. I'm not in a position to spend 30 hours / week doing bullshit puzzles & memorizing an algo book for crap that is basically irrelevant to my job.

You know what I'm good at?

- Spotting the bug before it happens, by watching how the team interacts and who is checking their work...

- Parsing client requirements and finding what matters

- Duct tape engineering so we can hit a go-live date when everything else is a smoking pile of delayed dog-shit...

- Talking the client into dropping a feature that we can't deliver and pivoting into something we already have...

Generally of far higher value than some brain teasers...

It started well and devolved into a bitter rant about the universe. So... here's some perspective from a career on both sides of the table.... (manager and engineer)

- For many teams and personalities, it is very hard to ship anything without a deadline. (as a solo founder, I actually use this psychology on myself to stay on track.)

- Short chunks and deadlines work better than longer ones.

- Peer pressure is a powerful stimulant.

- Your time is not of equal value. You don't really have seventy hours of quality work in a week. You've got maybe 15 "truly inspired" hours, 25 "grind it out" hours, and a lot of filler, face time, and paper shuffling after that. If you're smart, you slip in some employer funded personal growth & education time into that mix.

The classic mistake is to screw up the mix. I actually run into this as a freelancer. My rate for "truly inspired" time (real thinking about theory, architecture, influencing others, lecturing, or consulting on high level topics - eg. I must be fully present and prepared) is between $150 - $500 per hour (depending on the degree to which I'm inspired by the topic in question; $500 if I couldn't give a crap, $150 if I'm truly interested), "grind time" is $75 - $90 (you're paying for work without face time or deep insights, done at my convenience), and I'm unsure how to sell people filler, face-time, and paper shuffling. My typical solution is to go take a nap.

By the way... once you deduct pitching and running the business (10 hours, mix of inspired & grind), that means a freelancer REALLY has only 20 - 25 hours of useful time to sell in the course of a week. Past that, you're either working much harder than an employee or trying sub in filler and hoping your client doesn't notice it...

The typical employee is selling 15 - 25 hours of grind, perhaps 5 of inspired time (if you're lucky) and as much filler and self-directed time as you can get away with. From an employee satisfaction perspective, inspired is a win, filler / self-directed time is neutral to a win (depending on how well you entertain yourself), grind is a negative. Grind time is less onerous if you feel like you are accomplishing something in the process.

My goal as a boss is to get as much grind / inspired time for my buck as possible, since that's what generates output. (employee development matters but is a complex payback balancing future productivity / retention / motivation; filler doesn't really help me at all) The essential management challenge is spotting people slipping filler into a day and telling them to get back to grind. Good bosses protect your inspired time. Someday I'll hopefully get to work for one again.... (LOL)

There's nothing REALLY wrong with doing an 80 hour sprint one week if you can engineer some paid downtime later. I have weeks where I'm exploited and - to be fair - others where I'm massively overcharging my employer. It evens out.

You're assuming:

a) the risk can be neatly packaged and mitigated b) the cost of appropriately mitigating that risk wouldn't preclude running the business.

Long tail risks exist in every business, that rare event that takes the whole thing down. There are tons of them.

Each of which has a .00001% chance of happening.

The consumer brand version of this having one of your employees say some stupid shit in at bar (on video) or the summer intern like the wrong tweet, at which point a woke mob descends upon your brand with pitchforks at the ready....

There is no practical way to mitigate this. You can do the basics (don't hire assholes) but it's open season from there.

I've always thought the most thankless job in the world is running HR or PR at a massive retail company like Wal-mart or Macdonalds. You're one redneck idiot away from being on the national news (for doing or saying something most reasonable humans would never dream of) and you have literally hundreds of thousands of these people showing up for work each day.

At which point, you get the soul crushing task of getting on national television to explain the conduct of the moron in question and explain how it doesn't represent some embedded policy of the company to encourage <bad thing>. Better yet - you get do this every couple of months, since you have hundreds of thousands of these morons. Statistically, it becomes a predictable process.

(No offense, but this is about as non-hypothetical as it can get. This was my reality in the recent past)

A good question. Here's an attempt at a reply..

- You're trying to retain 5, not the 50.. the other 45 are objectively not-critical to the enterprise (in the sense we could eliminate or replace those roles).

- A large fraction of the 45 are basically screwed in the job market; most of them were older, had decades of very specific experience, or had worked their way up in an organization that valued effort/loyalty over credentials. Milking another decade of work in their current role has life changing consequences for these workers and their families. Many of them were primary breadwinners in a bad area, so their job was the last line of defense between a respectable lower-middle class existence and the trailer park for them and their kids.

- Current reality was not reflective of long run potential. If we could stabilize the business, not only would the 50 jobs in question be preserved but there was an opportunity to rebuild and hire back. (feel good moment: this actually occurred. The team was able to restart key areas of the facility and we rehired some manufacturing people)

Young, highly educated people have no concept of the degree of privilege they enjoy in the labor markets. That degree opens doors and you don't get tossed out the instant some hiring manager sees a little grey hair. You don't have 30 years of experience which immediately becomes the leading reason NOT to hire you for a job because someone thinks you're incapable of learning anything new.

Life basically sucks past 50...

My point is frequently your world descends into a flaming pile of shit unannounced.

Go ask the career restaurant workers how the year is going. Go ask the tourism guides and travel agents. Go ask their bosses how they intend to keep the doors open with an 80% decline in revenue.

Short answer: you can't.

Is that before or after you learn that the typical severance for the people in question was less than a week's pay?

So when it was "your turn", you're going to get tossed in the street with NOTHING to tide you over to your next gig.

Still feel like letting your family starve for the sake of "loyalty"?

In that event, most of the people in question will accept an offer from a competitor with greater assurances of financial security and return to loot and pillage what's left of the business on behalf of their new sponsors.

If you're lucky, they merely poach the stuff you cannot defend anymore. In most situations, they come after the crown jewels of the business, accounts which create the lions share of the revenue and profits which funds the business.

And then you're screwed. Shut it down, pink slips for everyone...

Find better executives :)

Not everyone is equal in that analysis.

And in a financially constrained endgame, you have to make choices about who to keep and cut.

Cutting that senior sales executive will cost 20 other jobs due to lost business and downstream implications.

Cutting the factory worker costs zero other jobs.

The harsh reality is not everyone matters equally.

[and to be clear, I'm not talking about bullshit deals just because someone was "loyal" to the CEO. This is real talk, people who actually can deliver a path to group survival]

I'm keenly aware of the disparity. However...

- If we do not keep the highly paid senior sales rep, we're going to have no customers and thus... everyone gets canned. - They are objectively better off leaving for another firm, where they don't need to worry about impending doom. So we need to provide an appropriate incentive to prevent them from breaking ranks and screwing everyone else left behind. - The humble factory worker or customer service person doesn't have that same kind of impact on the whole....

Any moral conversation ultimately becomes a discussion about why someone with objectively better and safer options should continue to work for a company that is paying them less than market. Unless everyone else is willing to work for reduced salary / benefits and promise not to quit, that's not a morally tenable position....

Personally, I'd love it if people acted for the greater good. That's not going to happen here, unless you want to restrict people from changing employers and force them to show up to work...

Eh, you're not getting just how deep in the shit we were.

Sometimes you can't give everyone a pony.

There simply wasn't any money. That's the essence of running in financial distress. No banks, no loans, insurance support payments got swiped by other people we owed money to... You're running on the cash in the till.

We started with 500 jobs, most of which were union gigs with benefits. About 50 were still with us a week later, when this brutal end game went into full effect.

The cost of failure for this nasty little endgame for the 50 survivors, the quest for a sustainable business? We were an older union workforce, operating in an area with young non-union shops with sketchy labor policies. Our local employees were getting offers for $12 / hour with no benefits. Or a 40%+ drop in compensation for office staff due to age discrimination.

That's the difference between retiring for a nice middle class lifestyle and eating cat food for your golden years. Fifty lives fucked up, for loyal company soldiers.

So yeah, I wanted to keep the company alive to save jobs.

I'm a high end mercenary; I had an offer within a week of formally rolling off the program and plenty of consulting work to tide me over. My only prize here was moral satisfaction.

"very few businesses are the product of a small subset of its people"

Hate to break it to you but that is EXACTLY what is going on here. Some people have EXPONENTIALLY more impact on saving a business than everyone else in the building. Real world examples:

- Two sales people who knew every high profit customer in our local market, which was the core of our turnaround plan

- My product engineer, with "the specs in her head". We could have never rebooted the business without her.

- The last manufacturing engineer standing, who we needed in the event we could secure a new facility for operations.

- My boss, the master deal maker who knew every major retail chain on our side of the country. Our secret to rebuilding the critical mass required for survival.

- One commercial manager (there were two of us), who was tasked with re-balancing the entire business on the fly to deal with massive swings in costs and competitor activity. Our pre-fire business model was completely shot and the banks cut us off, so we needed to reorganize around the new reality and find a way to generate positive cash flow to survive.

Without those five people / groups, the game was over - there would be no recovery plan, no road back to sustainable operations. Everyone else is irrelevant, potential cost savings when we needed them. You are playing a very high stakes short term game for the humble prize of survival...

Finance's job was basically to keep the tie fighters off our back, keep the lawyers, bankers, and insurance people away from folks doing the actual work. Customer Service was there to gently wind down relationships with non-critical accounts, in the vague hopes we could come back someday. We were able to give a few people some runway on those teams, moving anyone who wasn't able to hit the street immediately onto those lists to give them a little more time.

And your key people are irreplaceable in that world. There's no way someone of equivalent expertise is walking into that mess for what you're able to pay them.

At an individual level? We had to invoke our worst endgame due to other issues (deal fell apart); four of the critical five are no longer with the company. Each of them landed with a promotion and a fairly substantial raise elsewhere, often with instructions to "go take their business back". (at that point, it was open season for those accounts; our prior employer was unable to service them) The typical job search for that level of talent is hours / days rather than weeks or months (there is a very specific set of people who will hire them immediately if given the chance) .

Any visions of nobility needs to balanced against your obligations to support your spouse and children. You're going to sacrifice your kids future for some random people they never met? Your spouse is cool with that? Get real. (Mine knew what was going to happen; I had "the talk" with her beforehand. We knew my job was going to be eliminated and I couldn't break ranks without screwing my people. But we've both done turnaround work before, so we had a plan to handle it. She's one in a million.)

So that's the shit-show you're trying to hold together.

Heck, I had a financial model sitting on my laptop to go buy one of my dying brands from the company, once it was very apparent that they weren't able to protect it. At that point, it was basically sitting by the side of the road waiting for someone to claim it...

That doesn't work in small organizations with no bench strength. The next person is line usually isn't qualified.

It rarely works in large ones. Especially for an abrupt transition. An effective executive, particularly on the commercial side, is a living walking Rolodex of internal and external relationships which are immediately no longer working on behalf of the company.

Worse, they may work against you. I've seen competitors come swoop up top sellers or sales leaders and have them strip mine the good accounts from the remaining customer base.

I've actually helped manage a company in financial distress. Here's reality:

- First, most executives have little impact on the specific event that put the firm under. (I was a senior marketing person; the building burned down. Fire safety was most assuredly NOT within my purview or even something I could ask about)

- Running a business in financial distress basically sucks. Take your job and make it 10 X harder. You're basically running a startup, except your credit is officially shot, your employees know layoffs are coming, your competitors and customers know you're vulnerable, and key personnel with families are saying to hell with this, I want to be sure my kid is going to college (and bailing out).

- I'll go one better, speaking from experience. Most key executives can take part of the business with them. So when they leave, part of what little is left of the company leaves with them (customers, technology, capabilities). What are you going to do, sue? bwahahah. Good luck, your lawyers are already swamped...

- Most executives are actually reasonable talented people. They have value on the open market. Often significant and freed of any golden handcuffs they once wore.

- Oh yeah... there is a high probability of failure or other drastic changes. So promises are worthless. Our leadership structure changed three times in five months. You have no guarantees that the person who made a promise will be in a position to honor it (or even be around). Turnarounds are a cash-only game.

So unless you like working for free - in hell... the current system is the only way to get decent talent to stay.

I'm struggling to call this predatory pricing when most of the food delivery app industry is unprofitable.

The correct industry action: push through higher pricing for the end users, share gains with drivers and restaurants to get to a sustainable business model, and accept the resulting decline in unit volume. (which also means fewer drivers will have jobs, so there's a human cost here as well)

It's easy to tell "corporations" to just suck it up, but you're dealing with a pure variable cost business here. If you make it unprofitable to serve a particular geography, they'll just exit the market. That only consolidates future market power in the surviving businesses....

I build websites and manage them for cash-flow (and have been doing this for a decade). Started with SAAS affiliate sites and moved onto a more ambitious vision of cleaning up content categories on Google that are loaded with bad advice. (So build a better site that replaces self-serving junk and amateur nut-job sites with real content)

My latest project (un-monetized) is an attempt to raise the bar in the business opportunities vertical; I aim to research and lay out (in non-promotional terms) paths to earning a living wage in the gig economy. There's a lot of bad advice pushing courses / e-books / etc with a high rate of failure. Most of these gig economy roles are fairly simple businesses to manage; the idea is if you can instill some self-employment literacy, you can even the odds for new freelancers and side hustlers.

I'm working on a publishing model which delivers legitimate advice with a decent chance of success (for the reader) and a fair return for the publisher. https://highestpayinggigs.com/

So a couple of thoughts...

- Don't write off working for domestic SMB's just because their sales are in a downturn. At least 50% of my earnings over the past decade was building software & analytics tools for companies that were in outright financial distress. The pain of the downturn will prompt people to change their organization and process in ways they never imagined. As a developer, you can make an excellent living as an enabler of that change.

(In fact, I get a premium due to my experience in this space)

- Overseas freelancing is a meat market on the provider side; that being said, most of your competition sucks. (speaking as someone who spends five figures a year on offshore talent). Lots of exaggerated resumes, lousy rush jobs, and general lack of professional service. There is a high risk you're going to have to fix the work later. This is particularly true for clients with an established business and something to lose if the project goes sour. Avoid "aspiring CEO's" and other cheap d-bags lurking on the platform. Raise your prices and you'll be surprised to find decent clients who are willing to pay for value.

Rate also isn't everything. Consider % of time billable and % of time chasing clients or payment. One big advantage to places like Upwork (if you can land the right clients) is you don't need to screw around with the even larger pile of BS involved in working with small businesses directly. (Like um, tire-kickers and people that slow pay invoices)

- I wouldn't write as an overseas freelancer. I would consider publishing and affiliate marketing. Your content and code is just as good as that published by a high cost country and you have a cost advantage. It's not all junk either - take a look at SAAS affiliate marketing... it's a fairly natural place to go if you've got real world IT experience and doesn't involve mortgaging your soul to push someone's fake pills or dating scam... https://highestpayinggigs.com/affiliate-marketing/saas/