Dissecting White Collar Crime

I think that there are several reasons white collar crimes are common today. First, there is great social stigma against crimes like robbery or violence, but "creative accounting" and copyright violation are generally encouraged in our culture. The second reason, mostly restricted to management, is that earning a massive paycheck bloats the ego and makes people feel like they can do no wrong. The third reason, which I think is more prevalent in STEM fields, is that engineers and scientists are in demand and feel like they are difficult to replace. These are underlying problems that need to be addressed.

Things They Didn't Teach You In College

Here are some things I've learned on the job that college did not prepare me for. Hopefully it will help some people.

• Don't lie to anyone, it does terrible things to your reputation.  Corollary: If you can't say anything nice about someone, keep your mouth shut.
• Keep a record of your work in a spreadsheet, including hours worked. This might save your bacon one day when an enterprising co-worker accuses you, but it's mostly so you can visually see how you're doing and make corrections if necessary.
• Deliver. You are answerable to your boss, do the tasks which are assigned to you. If your company does not use task tracking software, you should write everything down so that you don't forget anything.
• If you can't deliver, give notice. As you gain experience you'll become familiar with your own ability to perform work. If you think you won't be able to meet a deadline you originally committed to, send a quick email to your boss letting him know ASAP.
• Learn to communicate. I've found that many engineers are bad at this. Before you write an email, or get up from your desk to talk to anyone, lay out in your head exactly what you need and how you're going to ask for it.
• Be mindful of office politics. You don't have to participate in it, but keep your eyes open. Much of the resistance you will get from your co-workers in a large office is tribal.

Rebuttal: Porn Should Be An Opt-In Feature

The New Market

My brother runs a company with over a dozen employees and has published two games on Steam. Despite the size of the company, he doesn't own an office. He also doesn't have a college degree. He started the company when he was a teenager and dropped out of high school to work full-time on it.

My brother's company is entirely Internet-based. Everybody lives in a different state. A few employees live outside of the country. The employees communicate with each other and hold meetings over Skype. They synchronize their work using SVN version control software. They receive paychecks through PayPal, and more recently through online bank transfers. They advertise the game through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube on a marketing budget of zero dollars. Most of the website, blog, and forums were built by my brother (who has never taken a programming class and does not consider himself a programmer).

This is the sort of thing that would have been impossible twenty years ago. Companies used to sell computers and software through large retail outlets like department stores and mail-order catalogs. The manufacturer had to convince the retailer that the product was able to be sold to a wide audience. Without a distribution platform, a product could not be mass-produced and sold to customers. Today high-volume retail platforms still exist and are helpful, but my brother's company got by for a year using nothing but Kickstarter and PayPal transactions. Customers came to the website, bought a game directly, and downloaded their copy of the game from the company's web server. Business is rapidly changing to fit this new direct-to-consumer market, and the barrier for entry has never been lower.

Trying To Get Into Open Source

Back in September I tried to work on an open source project for a game called Empyrea. I had backed the Kickstarter, but the creator quit working on it full-time and offered everyone refunds. Most backers refused the refunds and asked him to release the source code instead, so he did. It was early-production, written in Python (not my first language), and each source file was a distressing wall of thousands of lines of code. Sadly, I had to give up after only a few hours of trying to add a world export feature. I had thought that working on open source would be fun and exciting, but I was shocked to learn that open source projects are as difficult to develop as work and school projects (if not more!)

"Year of the Linux Desktop"? More like, "hey, buy our new linux phone, okay?"

On May 30th 2013, Mark Shuttleworth marked Ubuntu bug #1 as "fixed". The bug was a vision statement for Ubuntu Linux which was titled, "Microsoft has a majority market share." The reproduction steps were "visit a local PC store... attempt to buy a machine without any proprietary software." Shuttleworth wrote a post explaining why he marked it as fixed. Was it because you can walk into a PC store and see Linux computers on sale today? Well, no... Instead Shuttleworth explained that Android was a major share of "mobile computing", mentioned the Ubuntu Azure and Ubuntu Cloud programs, and declared "from Ubuntu's perspective, this bug is now closed." Meanwhile, yesterday I ran Ubuntu 13.10 in a virtual machine and suffered severe lag on the desktop due to fancy desktop graphical effects which cannot be disabled. Well played, Mark.

Nintendo Sells Nintendoes

Three months ago a Nintendo CEO explained to investors why a Mario game would not be sold on the iPhone. I love this story because it demonstrates how shareholders do not always have the company's best interests in mind. An antsy investor can flip his stock at any time, but owners and employees are in it for the long haul. In this case, investors want Nintendo to sell their games on their competitor Apple's hardware. Although there is a market demand for what the investors want, Nintendo's console-based business model would suffer in the long run. Nintendo sells Nintendo games, which cease to be Nintendo games if they're not sold for Nintendoes.