61–70 of 116 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any kind of sales where you are buying leads or paying for the right sell someone else's product. If it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you.
> it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you Counterfactual: franchises.
My wife is a pharmacist. Over the past two decades the number of pharmacy schools has increased and some schools have gotten bigger classes, such that now every year there are about 25% more Pharm.D's made than in 2005. The result has been a predictable decrease in pharmacist quality of life- the pay is basically the same number of dollars today that you would get in 2005 so inflation has made them poorer, the hours…
Example industries I’ve worked in: pro audio(Avid), consumer hardware (Apple), social networks (Facebook), medical marijuana, education, crypto currency (Coinbase).
My work has impacted tens of millions of people and generated massive revenues for the companies I’ve worked for.
Sadly Chemical engineers and pharmacists are very specialized jobs that often require masters degrees and hence don’t have the same career flexibility.
This friction in career switching combined with the cost of education in the USA is a big problem. Their are few professions that offer the same bang for your buck as software engineering. We are a very privileged and lucky group of people.
There's definitely a trend where large corporations/institutions push risk and liability down onto individuals, who have a hard time quantifying it properly. They make promises about "independence" and "entrepreneurship" and "building wealth", but they're really just taking advantage of an information asymmetry, tricking uninformed individuals into accepting a deal that is much worse than they think. See: Uber, Subwa…
Any kind of sales where you are buying leads or paying for the right sell someone else's product. If it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you.
1 person has limited time. They can be doing it themselves and still sell you the rights to do it too. It would be pure coincidence if the market demand fit exactly into 1 persons ability to supply it. I say 1, but this is not limited to 1 person.
Selling information is a valid transaction. It requires much less time, and the price is justified by a similar idealogy to having trade secrets. Yes I could pursue this list of 100 potentials and convert 5% of them for 50k over the next couple months OR I can sell it to someone else for 2k and do something else with my time.
If selling information is an established type of sale, then it follows that at a large enough scale of demand, someone can specialize in that sale rather than acting on the relevant information at all. And now AGAIN it would be pure coincidence if that 1 person specializing in selling only information is exactly meeting the demand for such activity. So they accept money to train others on how to sell information.
Hence the entire data broker industry.
The problem is that even though this truth exists, the trust involved is easily abusable. I don't think I need to explain how.
It isn't a pyramid scheme, but it can very easily become a saturated market where late comers end up getting no value back since there still is a very real limit on demand. But it is not good for sales for the people training others in the sale of information to acknowledge that limit, so it ultimately leads to people effectively getting scammed even without anyone explicitly trying to scam anyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any kind of sales where you are buying leads or paying for the right sell someone else's product. If it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you.
The plain concept of the specialization of labor demonstrates that this is false, at least as a blanket statement. Sales is a skill. Making products is a skill. The people who have these skills is not always the same person or organization. Information or power asymmetry is the problem. Sometimes it’s the other way around. E.g. a large retailer selling a small company’s products.
That first sentence was important context for the second.
There's definitely a trend where large corporations/institutions push risk and liability down onto individuals, who have a hard time quantifying it properly. They make promises about "independence" and "entrepreneurship" and "building wealth", but they're really just taking advantage of an information asymmetry, tricking uninformed individuals into accepting a deal that is much worse than they think. See: Uber, Subwa…
These are weird comparisons. In some cases, the individual is the sales function, in some cases its the supply function, in other cases its a full blown SBU.
I don't think you can bucket all of these into MLM, because, well, some of them have nothing to do with marketing (ya know, the M part of MLM).
My wife is a pharmacist. Over the past two decades the number of pharmacy schools has increased and some schools have gotten bigger classes, such that now every year there are about 25% more Pharm.D's made than in 2005. The result has been a predictable decrease in pharmacist quality of life- the pay is basically the same number of dollars today that you would get in 2005 so inflation has made them poorer, the hours…
You're wondering about the software industry specifically, but what you're really asking about is the education industrial complex. Universities are not in the business of properly meeting labor demands of the market with skilled workers, and they never have been. Their goal is to increase enrollment and capture as much grant and tuition money as they can. Universities don't care if too many lawyers, chemical enginee…
My wife is a pharmacist. Over the past two decades the number of pharmacy schools has increased and some schools have gotten bigger classes, such that now every year there are about 25% more Pharm.D's made than in 2005. The result has been a predictable decrease in pharmacist quality of life- the pay is basically the same number of dollars today that you would get in 2005 so inflation has made them poorer, the hours…
Software engineering isn't tied to one particular business model, like pharmacy, oil, or airlines. There's the "software industry" and there's all the industries who also have software developers. Big tech has had a massive boom, pushing up salaries. I'm not so sure devs outside of the official software industry are doing great (are they? Someone comment), though of course there's an evaporation of talent to the high…
Software Engineering is probably the widest and deepest career choice out there. For example, Web development is just a tiny piece of it.
MLM: Multilevel Marketing scheme
Articles like this grind my gears when they mention an ancronym in the title and I have to read through 4 paragraphs before finding out what MLM means.
(Btw: TTRPGs = Table-Top RolePlaying Games :P)
My wife is a pharmacist. Over the past two decades the number of pharmacy schools has increased and some schools have gotten bigger classes, such that now every year there are about 25% more Pharm.D's made than in 2005. The result has been a predictable decrease in pharmacist quality of life- the pay is basically the same number of dollars today that you would get in 2005 so inflation has made them poorer, the hours…
I'm sure that we haven't found the limit yet. Usually this kind of discussion turns to supply-and-demand economics and somebody says that if you want to hire software engineers you just have to offer more. That's not wrong, but it too narrow a view. A free labour market ensures that skilled people get allocated to the highest value work, which is a great outcome for everyone. But there are so many projects that never…
I agree with that.
> A free labour market ensures that skilled people get allocated to the highest value work, which is a great outcome for everyone.
Value in terms of dollars is not really correlated with productive value to society. I think a lot of the software that's being built, shouldn't be built.