10 марта, 2005
The greatest job in the world
Если хотите знать почему моя работа лучше любой вашей - почитайте внимательно до конца. Основной смысл - в последних двух предложениях. Если вы не согласны - значит вы не поняли сути, или ваше бессознательное не дает вам ее понять.
A shareware author is somebody who writes and publishes shareware. Shareware is a way of marketing software. Instead of buying the software in a retail store, coming home and then finding out how it works, with shareware you download a trial version, install it, and try it out for some period of time (usually 30 days) before you buy it. You can see if the software is any good or not before you pay for it.
Shareware is great for software users, but the great thing about being a shareware author is that if people buy your product, you know it must be good. They have already used it and decided that it is worth paying for. Shareware is the ultimate software meritocracy. Only the best software will survive.
Being a shareware author is the greatest job in the world.
You can work at home, so you avoid a daily commute to an office. You are your own boss. You have all the benefits of owning your own business. You can work or not work whenever it is convenient.
But the best thing about being a shareware author is that you have customers who choose to be customers.
The way shareware works is that people download your shareware version and try out it, and only if they like it, they buy it. So only a few people actually become your customers. For most shareware businesses, this is about 0.1% to 5% of the people who download.
But anyway, what matters is that only a small number of people order and become customers. But they are the best ones! In general, the people who order tend to be the people who are also the easiest and most pleasant to deal with. The people who aren't pleasant and easy to deal with generally don't order anyway, so you don't have to worry about them.
This means that as a shareware author you've got all the best customers. Furthermore, you know that only people who really actually like the product are buying it, so you know your work must be good. The end result is that it is a much more fulfilling job than the jobs that most regular computer programmers have.