(1994 to 1999) OS/2 era     (2000 to 2011) Windows era     (2012 –) New Era

While the unemployment rate nationally remains over 8%, the unemployment rate in the tech industry is basically zilch. Software developers and game studios can't hire people fast enough and fiercely compete for the talent out there. This is why companies fiercely guard their company cultures. When every person at a given company knows that they can easily find another job if they so choose, the onus is on companies to make sure that the "work experience" is such that they have an incentiv...

First off, I want to thank all the people who have written their kind words of support these past few days. I wish I could say this is the first time we’ve had to deal with a frivolous lawsuit and I wish I could say it was the last. It happens. It’s business. The only difference here is that one party doesn’t normally leak this sort of thing out to get press coverage. It is amazing how many people will look at a bunch of unsubstantiated allegations and assume they’r...

What kind of place do you want to work at? Stardock’s a pretty fun place to work.  We have almost no turn over and morale is pretty high.  It is, however, a nerdy place. That means there’s lots of references to Monty Python, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Robot Chicken that sometimes float around.  That is to say, it's not a place for everyone. When we interview people, we make some effort to make sure people know that Stardock is a silly place.  People bring th...

I originally wrote this on Qt3 but I think this might be helpful to others who are wondering about the effects of working long hours. Here are my views on the matter: I think with most people, 55 to 60 hours a week is about the maximum before they start to eat up stored health/sanity points. And even there, over time, you will start to suffer burn-out -- the rate depends on how much you enjoy what you’re working on. But sooner or later, it’ll catch up on you. Up until last year, m...

Guys like me aren’t supposed to get “rich”. When you look at the most successful (or rich) people in the tech industry they usually have remarkably similar backgrounds. By contrast, guys like me are supposed to be relegated to some back lab coding drivers.  That was, when I was in college, the dream.  Of course, that dream didn’t come true because I couldn’t afford college and had to work multiple jobs at once to pay for school. I discovered that the best way to make money was to ...

The more well known you are, the less control one has over the narrative. That’s why those who try to “leak” things to the media or try to manipulate the media narrative are playing with fire.  Most situations situations are fairly boring. Boring doesn’t generate page views. As a result, there is a tendency to spice those headlines up. Brad: The Narrative To use myself as an example, here are some facts vs. narratives I’ve read. Issue Narrative Real...

I'm told that my interview with Wired magazine regarding the death of Steve Jobs is scheduled to show up in the August issue of Wired.  Keep an eye out! 

That’s a graph of the Elemental home page traffic as we added ads onto the forums promoting Elemental on our other sites.

I get asked this a lot. And the answer I gave most recently was “About a third smaller than it is today.” As a statistical nut, I made a pie chart of what I spend my day doing. It was depressing. Most of my work day is spent doing business stuff.  And the more “successful” (and I use that term with some derision these days) the worse it gets.  Every week I can count on an hour of legal review. What kind of legal landmines do we need to watch out for now? If you’re a bus...

I was somewhat bummed to read on Coding Horror that Jeff Atwood is leaving the Stack Exchange.   As many of you know, we are pretty religious readers of Coding Horror and Joel on Software. Jeff’s blog had come up quite a bit recently as we are in the process of coming up with new coding standards here at work.  More specifically, his recent blog on anti-aliasing was a major inspiration for doing “spot antialising” in Elemental: Fallen Enchantress (the idea is ...

Mashable Business has a good article today on starting a business. They list 6 things which are very useful. It’s missing a few items that I think should be added or emphasized more. Here are 7 through 10 that I would have added: 7. Get used to failing often. The article talks about not being afraid to fail. But I think most people will take that as meaning that your business might fail.  In my 20 years of running a business, 90% of the things I’ve worked on have failed (from...

I started my company when I was still a teenager. And I can tell you, looking back, I wish I knew now what I knew then. Starting a company with no capital and no partners is most definitely the hard way to do things. But I had no money and none of my friends were comfortable taking the necessary risks. The result was many years of long hard slogging. Sheer brute force in terms of hours being put in. Capital trumps time. Anyone who says time is money really has no idea what they’re talking a...

Over the years, I’ve seen so many people with high potential diminish their prospects for success in business because they lacked a few key axioms of business. To that end, I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned (often the hard way) about what is what in business: #1 Risk capital trumps “sweat equity”.  The guy willing to risk real dollars is worth 100X as much as the guy who is willing to “risk” working hard for some period of time. If you disagree, you’ve probably never rem...