It has nothing to do with being a computer person, and everything with a decade long experience on the platform. If EPR were an actual thing, you would be able to predict your earnings. That has never in the history of Medium been the case. One story might make 3 cents / read, another might make 25 cents / per read this month. A platform will always tweak things to make the most of the pool of money it has available for its content contributors. The only metric that's probably worth something is BPM (Boost Per Month) because that at least indicates how much you cater to the layer of content the platform values the most. But obviously those who write gazillions of stories a month, will have a low or zero BPM because it's impossible to write Boostable content more than a couple of times a week. This is why I keep telling folks to write organically, when they really feel like writing about the things they really know and/or have lived.