People who hire freelancers should understand that this is a partnership. What does that mean? If you want us to go fast, you need to respond to our work quickly, and pay quickly. If you want consistency, it helps if your feedback is consistent. If multiple people provide contradictory feedback, it helps if you can…
Twitter is laying off thousands of employees starting today. Its email to employees is horrific. Start with this: the letter did not come from Elon Musk or, apparently, anyone: it’s just from “Team” with the same text sent to every employee in the company. This is cowardly and an unnecessary; every knows who’s responsible. Breaking…
I hate slow projects. I like thrill rides. Consider this 2 x 2 describing the universe of potential freelance projects, with two dimensions for different types of speed. The horizontal axis describes the amount of work. Is this something that can be completed quickly, like a blog post or a tweet, or a big job…
The price of freelance work goes up as you involve more people from your company in their work. Call it the “collaboration tax.” The best analogy I can give is this: I once hired a carpenter to rebuild the porch on my house. I wanted to see if I could get a better price than…
Should internet infrastructure companies desert sites that spread hate? That’s a very hard question. Let’s look at one recent instance — Cloudflare withdrawing its product from Kiwi Farms — and analyze the statement they make to justify their extraordinary actions. Who is Kiwi Farms? Kiwi Farms is an online community for trolls who harass people…
At my last company, the job of “editor” was sort of a big deal. The editor was typically the supervisor of the analyst writing the research reports. That meant the editor had two jobs: First, to provide content and language guidance to the analyst. And second, to cajole and nag the analyst into producing something…
Meta had an earnings call this week. Revenues and profit are down. The metaverse division lost $2.8 billion in a single quarter. And Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, regarding the payroll, that there are “probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.” Here’s why that’s bad news for people using Facebook…
In 30 years of working for companies, I’ve seen a dozen layoffs. And I’ve observed dozens more at companies I was following closely. Why do companies choose to dump staff they’ve invested so much effort in hiring and training? The answer, more often than not, is an inevitable consequence of how companies plan for growth….
Rogers Communications is the dominant internet provider in Toronto and the rest of Ontario. When it failed on Friday, it crashed a quarter of Canada’s internet connections, disrupting everything from mobile service to work-at-home to financial transactions and emergency 9-1-1 service for parts of three days. Now that service appears to be back, Rogers has…