When you realize it was supposed to be a graphic novel, that makes the over-the-top scenes make so much more sense. It's a comic book without the comics.
No. You discuss it with your manager, and you do it at the appropriate time. Having both created, refactored and deleted lots of technical debt over the past 25 years, trust me: you just don't get to go rogue because "you're the engineer". If you do that, it might turn into "you were the engineer".
What if you spend a week or month refactoring something that needs a quick fix now and is being deleted in 1-2 years? That's waste, and if you went rogue, it's your fault. Besides, you always create added QA burden with large refactoring (yes even if you have tests), and you should not do that without a discussion first--even if you're the founder.
Communicate with your manager and (if they agree) VP if needed, and do the right thing at the right time.
Maybe the young men measured have low enough testosterone ranges that the high/low cycles have less effect, but the more likely explanation is that the methodology of this study is pretty laughable...
What this leads to is the joke of guidelines like in Victoria, Canada, where the city basically is trying to mandate that buildings look "interesting", where interesting is defined as "the developer built it out of Jenga blocks that didn't quite line up right" and "used as many different colors as you would get fonts in a school newsletter".
Hey, in Canada the newest model will be! Next year we'll have, what, four F-35s? We'd almost be better off making a bunch of that bronze armour and the cool hats...
The cycle also goes hand-in-hand with languages and frameworks. I use VSCode for Ruby on Rails editing, but I don't need to. With TypeScript, however, it's a huge win -- just as IDEA or Eclipse were essential for Java, back in the day.
We treat all author support issues to [email protected] as confidential, of course. For author support issues which are fine to discuss in public, you can see our author forum at https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors ... If you look there, you can see a representative sample of the issues people have had recently. (I don't want to turn this HN thread into a Leanpub author support forum thread, of course! However, our authors typically seem pretty happy with our service...)
Regardless of what type of book your wife is writing, if she uses Leanpub she needs to do the upload to KDP herself: Leanpub doesn't currently do anything here.
There are other companies like BookBaby which do the "publish to Amazon for you" type of thing; Leanpub currently does not do that. We are just a toolchain to make ebooks plus an optional storefront to sell them. You can sell the ebooks you produce using Leanpub on any storefront such as KDP; you own your work. We do not have many romance writers on Leanpub, and a simple look at our homepage will explain why: our storefront looks like a place for computer programming books, not romance novels.
Also, most romance novels are written in Word, not Markdown, and our Word support is a hidden feature, kind of like the secret menu at In-N-Out burger. The way our Word support works is that you write in a Dropbox folder (or using GitHub or Bitbucket), and you make your Book.txt file list one or more Word files (instead of Markdown files) as the manuscript content. Then when you click the button to preview or publish the ebook, we generate the PDF, EPUB and MOBI based on those Word files, and you can do whatever you want with them. It's actually pretty smooth once you set it up, but it sounds really complicated, and we don't market it at all: hence another reason we don't have many romance writers on Leanpub!
Anyway, if that sounds like a useful thing then we may be worth a shot. Leanpub book landing pages look nice and professional, but in terms of attracting an audience of readers for a romance novel, we are not going to be much help. This is why places like Wattpad do well in this regard. (Leanpub does help attract an audience for our computer programming books and similar types of books, of course, primarily through our weekly and monthly sale newsletters.)
Frankly, my recommendation for any aspiring first-time novelist with a small social media following would be to publish in-progress on Wattpad first to see if they get traction, and then to consider Substack and Amazon KDP for places to monetize if they do. Then once they've gotten to that point, if they're looking for tools to produce a nice ebook to sell on KDP, Leanpub is one of the options they can use as a toolchain.
(On the other hand, if they have a reasonable social media following, they could skip Wattpad and go directly to Substack, KDP or even Leanpub and point their followers at the appropriate landing page for their book...)
Ironically, I've been talking about the relationship between lean publishing and serial fiction for a long time (for example, this video from a conference talk I did in 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA), but Leanpub has never hit anything close to product-market fit for fiction. We do well in our niche of computer programming / data science / business types of books, but we have essentially no traction in fiction for a number of reasons.
If an author was going to use Leanpub for fiction, the right thing to do would be to use our toolchain to generate the ebook and print-ready PDF, but then to also publish it on Amazon KDP and Wattpad for the exposure. For example, my teenage son did this with his debut sci-fi novel: he wrote it in Word (since he didn't want to write in Markdown, despite my best efforts to convince him that Markdown was superior), did a git push to his book repo on GitHub, generated the ebook on Leanpub (our Word support is an unofficial hidden feature; we just use pandoc to turn the .docx into Markdown first), and then uploaded it to Amazon. Ironically, the worst thing about this whole process was at the end: he also had to copy and paste the chapters into Wattpad when he did an update, and Wattpad wants small chapters for page views, so the copying and pasting was a very slow manual process...
One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on the publisher's portion, which is about half of retail. And no, fiction books don't sell for $20 typically, but I'm using this number to make the math easy.)
Now, if you sell 5000 copies of an ebook for $20 and earn 80% royalties, you earn $16 per copy, and earn $80,000. This is the royalty rate on Leanpub (disclosure: cofounder), but with Gumroad or blog + Stripe approaches you'd earn an even better percentage (if you want to run your own store).
For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that. If you can get a few thousand people to subscribe for a few bucks a month, you could do well. The people at the top are doing really, really well: https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/
This reads like something from The Three Body Problem :)