About this book, and why there is no author name

This book is published under a name that is not a person’s, and you are entitled to be suspicious of that. The book asks you to ask who benefits from every claim you read, so it would be dishonest to refuse the question here.

What you can check instead of a byline

Nobody paid for this book to be written. No commission, no sponsor, no client. No organisation named in it has any relationship to it — several are criticised by name, and none was contacted for approval. There are no affiliate links, referral codes or paid placements. Nothing here earns money if you click it or enrol in it.

The reason for the pen name is plain: this book tells people not to buy things, and that is easier to write, and harder to soften later, without a career attached to it.

The trade is real and it costs you something. You cannot look up the author’s record. What you get instead is a source, a grade and a date on every claim, a chapter listing what would prove the book wrong, and an appendix listing what it does not know.

Check the book, not the author. That is what Part I is for, and it works on this book too.

Why “Grade One”

The name claims nothing. It is not an institute, a council, a society or a guild, and it is not a person, so no reader is deceived about who wrote this.

It pays off inside the book. A reader reaches Chapter 5, learns that grade 1 means a body with the power to compel an answer and nothing to sell you, and finds that the name on the spine was a claim about method rather than about status.

What this book is

A method, and forty-six worked examples of that method.

The method measures any computing career across ten dimensions. The examples show the method working on real careers, with real numbers. The method is the part that lasts — numbers age, a way of thinking does not.

What it is not

It is not a complete list of computing careers. No such list exists.

Here is the honest reason. Reliable career data does not exist for most of the world. It is good in the United States. It is fair in Western Europe. It thins out quickly after that, and for many countries there is nothing at all.

Any book that claims to cover every career in every country has filled the gaps with salary websites. Chapter 4 shows you why you cannot trust those numbers.

So this book does something different. Where the data is missing, it says so, and the register of everything missing is published.

How to argue with it

Everything the book is built on is free to download under CC BY 4.0 — the bibliography and the gap register, as CSV and JSON. You do not have to buy the book to check the book.

If you find an error, send it. Corrections go to every buyer, and they are free, because being told a figure was wrong is part of what a reader already paid for.