15 ms·

Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

169 points by mathgenius 3y ago

mongol 3y ago
For someone that does not have English as a native language. Do you think Chat GPT could act as editor? Basically correcting grammatical mistakes and similar?
- throwaway33381 3y ago
  No. People have tried to use Grammarly for this. Using Chat GPT as a linter for writing is a terrible idea and I wouldn't suggest anyone use it. I wouldn't be surprised if Chat GPT hallucinated suggestions and problems in writing. For business writing on the other hand, maybe. For basic things it could be helpful. But it might cause a lot more unnecessary confusion. While looking as though you understand more than you do. What I mean by this is that instead of being confused as a misinterpretation by a secondary language speaker. Instead it will look as though you intentionally meant to say something someway. This sounds vague, because there are lots of issues that could possible occur. And this is the worst one I could think of off the top of my head. We see some people already using it to automate certain sections such as emails in their life, and well.. Good luck. It could easily write something you didn't want it to or say something you didn't mean because you didn't look closely at what you were writing. There's a lot of terrible consequences of this technology and to call it a productivity hack is well, not ideal.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  It’s pretty good at getting the grammar right. My guess is that it would be good at checking yours. The prose it produces isn’t great.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > It’s pretty good at getting the grammar right. My guess is that it would be good at checking yours. Writing something that fits the pattern of correct English is a very different thing for a tool to do than identifying and explaining what’s wrong with something with errors; ChatGPT by design is focused on the first, not the second. OTOH, grammar checkers are a thing, and if you have sub-native (or even just not-particularly-formally-polished native) proficiency in a language, they are definitely quite useful (well, at least the better ones for English are), you don’t need AI for this.
- john-tells-all 3y ago
  I tried to have Copilot extend my technical writing article. It was very fast... at writing very positive-sounding gibberish. Possibly with a better prompt it would be better.
Animats 3y ago
(2018). By someone who wrote clickbait for a living. Crushed when search engine companies figured out how to filter clickbait better. All this is pre-GPT, too. "So, tech bloggers can become venture capitalists. But what do politics and entertainment bloggers become? Mostly alcoholics."
- TehShrike 3y ago
  He's now the author of a very successful newsletter: https://www.thediff.co/ https://www.thediff.co/
poulsbohemian 3y ago
My partner is a freelance copywriter / editor. Despite all the talk about how AI is going to take her job, she’s more in demand than ever. She has companies begging her to come on full time, but makes good coin freelancing and gets to set her own schedule that way. One of the challenges I observe is that a lot of people get hired into marketing roles because they are high-energy project managers - but they don’t know how to write, ironically. So there is an opportunity to be the grunt behind the scenes cranking out all the different types of content needed in corporate America. Also - in many industries there are rules and regulations about what you can say, how and when you can say it. Knowing those nuances also adds to your value.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  My wife's employer has experimented with ChatGPT writing. Their experience has been it's way slower to use it in any but very limited ways, and having non-writers/editors try to use it to do the job of writers it is a disaster. I think you need just the right combo of task and worker to actually see a notable speed improvement from it... unless the job is "write huge amounts of bullshit", which some jobs truly are (astroturfing, certain kinds of advertising or marketing, scams). [EDIT] I should add that this isn't preventing them from hyping the effects externally. I'd be wary of companies' claims re: the effectiveness of AI. They're all afraid of being seen as having missed the train, even if the train's not really going where they need to go.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I've experimented myself and it's been vaguely helpful to create some stubs and to provide some boilerplate a bit faster than I could have generated myself. But I can't say I've found it genuinely useful for anything I want to be even workmanlike product on the other end.
  - grumpymouse 3y ago
    It’s probably the same deal as with LLMs generating code: it can crank out something that’s probably broken, and the person using the LLM needs to be able to know how to code to see where it’s broken. Companies might be able to reduce the headcount of programmers / copywriters / artists but certainly not replace them right now (or possibly ever).
j2kun 3y ago
For the HN crowd there's probably a more realistic path toward writing as a career: self-publishing technical books. [By one year after publishing my first book](https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programmers-introduction-to-mathematics/ https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programme...), I had sold 11k copies, and with self publishing you get a much bigger royalty from each copy, drastically lowering the bar for financial success. I expect my second book to do even better, because my audience has only grown since then and the book is more general purpose. I might be an outlier in that I have already built up a large audience from blogging about math. But the benefit of self-publishing, aiming your work at folks with disposable income, and having a niche all seem to make a full-time writing job quite straightforward.
- Throw73849 3y ago
  Another option is to write documentation for opensource projects. Many have some sort of funding, but not good doc.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from doing this. But there's some cachet to having your name on a book cover compared to being an unsung writer of docs. (Self-published vs. through a publisher is another more complicated discussion with both pros and cons on both sides.)
- tayo42 3y ago
  Just a general question, how do you know the topic is even worth writing a book about? Like spending a year working on it then watch the book fail. That would really suck. I guess in general, how do you know you have something interesting and captivating to say. Edit:for the weird auto completes
  - ghaff 3y ago
    For starters, you need to define what you consider success and failure. If it's to make a ton of money, you should probably reconsider your options right there. If it's to spend a bunch of time learning and thinking about a topic that may be something else. If it's just a fun side project (just wrapping up another one of those), that's fine too.
ghaff 3y ago
Unfortunately he saves the best bits for the very end. - There's definitely a conflict between being entertainment/provocative/etc. and "Just the facts maam." - For most people writing is most valuable in support of something else. Don't write a tech book for the royalty checks. But because of some combination of learning about a topic/you want to/it will enhance your career.
paulpauper 3y ago
Funny how people keep saying writing is a terrible career yet so many want to do it. Most careers are not that good, tbh: low pay, bad work conditions, and or lots of hours. Top Substack authors earning salaries comparable to STEM execs, but have a platform (which is also worth a lot), full autonomy, as well as extra income from books and affiliate links etc. Not bad work if you can get it.
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  >Everybody want to be a bodybuilder but nobody want to lift no heavy ass weight - Ronnie Coleman Everybody wants a high or cool status job, but few truly want to suffer what it takes to get that job, and in the case of writing, as with many things, there's too much luck involved, too strong a power law.
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    Even people who get the jobs suffer from them. I've met a lot of journalists and I live in fantasy land compared to them. In exchange for a small amount of meaning, they take on a lot of extra suffering.
  - laratied 3y ago
    Ronnie Coleman also can't walk anymore on his own because of those heavy weights. That could certainly apply in this context if talking 20 years down the line.
- idontpost 3y ago
  [dead]
- spadros 3y ago
  The point is it’s incredibly hard to get the the good work. It’s not bad, if you can survive the insane competition. Which most, by definition, cannot.
- Falkon1313 3y ago
  Not many jobs still pay you for the work you did a month, a year, 10 years, or 25 years ago. Not many jobs pay you just to sit at home and make up stories either. Of course many people want a job like that. But the actual day-to-day doing of it, well, that's quite another thing. And most of us just aren't cut out to be an Agatha Christie, Stephen King, or Isaac Asimov. You see some of that in music and similar things as well. For every AC/DC or Guns N' Roses, there were a million garage bands who worked hard but were lucky to get a gig at a local dive bar or a family member's wedding. That never stopped people from wanting to do it though.
papito 3y ago
I used it to write a cover letter. Saved me a whole day! I hate writing cover letters. And of course I had to read it to make sure I was not a COBOL expert.
akhayam 3y ago
Let me provide an adjacent perspective: I started my career as an academic and excellent writing was survival in that jungle. While that's a profession where research and writing can actually "pay your bills" (metaphorically), it resembled Liu Cixin's dark forest: “The (academic) universe is a dark forest. Every civilization (professor / grad student) is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care." Profs and students would poach ideas, submit before the research was even complete blatantly violate double-blind reviews, and submit to multiple venues in parallel (a huge no-no in academic publishing). Arvix is the only silver lining on that cloud: https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Honestly what you describe is not dissimilar to how some engineers behaved at e.g. Google around projects and perf process. I'm not sure if they learn it in academia, or if the perf process is inspired by academia, or if it's just... human nature ... to create reward systems that amplify credit-stealing and fame seeking. But it sucks. And there's whole demographics of people who think it's normal.
  - akhayam 3y ago
    I feel it's all rooted in bad leadership. Leaders who don't understand who's actually doing the work hire more folks like them and then there is a chain reaction. Unfortunate, but true, part of most big companies.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      The performance review process at e.g. Google explicitly promotes credit and fame seeking. Recognition and "impact", especially cross-team, are called out as critical. You will not advance there without it. I saw plenty of projects get derailed by this. Technical goals in general take the back seat to presentation goals.
lucasgonze 3y ago
Growing up I envisioned myself as a writer. When I got old enough to test that out I found out the truth of this writer's piece: I was well-known but painfully poor. My girlfriend asked "what are you doing this for?" and I couldn't answer. I reset my career vision to writing creative code and everything turned around. Adulthood is crap except when it isn't.
- hbrn 3y ago
  "You should only write when you feel within you some completely new and important content, clear to you but unintelligible to others, and when the need to express this content gives you no peace."
  - lucasgonze 3y ago
    Any time you write you create noise for others. You shouldn't do that unless the information you are offering is valuable to them. Your writing can't be about you. It has to serve the reader.
    - hbrn 3y ago
      I strongly disagree, though I'm not a writer, so I'll just give you another quote (from "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser): Soon after you confront the matter of preserving your identity, another question will occur to you: “Who am I writing for?” It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.
      - lucasgonze 3y ago
        Which came first, the supply or the demand?
  - 3y ago
rahimnathwani 3y ago
If you're into finance and tech, you should subscribe to his newsletter: https://www.thediff.co/ https://www.thediff.co/ Even the free version has good content.
coldcode 3y ago
In high school, college, and in my 20's a wrote a lot, but I didn't like it enough to do it as a career. Instead I spent my life writing code and wrote a programming blog for almost 15 years that used to appear some on Hacker News (https://thecodist.com https://thecodist.com). I recently revived it because I like writing and now have time. I never tried to make money on it; it's just fun writing about programming and technology. Writing for a living would have been much less fun than doing programming for all those years and paying a lot less. I read a lot so I am glad there are people who still write for a living. Sadly the internet started off free, and now we are stuck with ads everywhere and paying writers a decent wage is becoming harder.
spondylosaurus 3y ago
I have some thoughts on this as a career writer who’s friends with plenty of other career writers—but most of those friends write the kind of content discussed here, whereas I'm a technical writer who works on software documentation (hence why I'm on HN :P). Technical writers do pretty well; we don’t make as much as engineers, but the pay is nothing to sneeze at. My friends who write blog posts, industry reports, and other corporate content (also usually in the software industry) do reasonably well too. But all the other writers I know are struggling. What’s interesting to me is that the struggling writers have jobs that most people would find more exciting than what I do: they write essays, or fiction, or they’re journalists at Conde Nast publications. Unless you’re a particular kind of nerd, interviewing SMEs and writing quickstart guides is a lot less glamorous than interviewing public figures and having your name featured in bylines. In some ways it does seem like the perceived glamor of these jobs is a double-edged sword: the allure of what you do makes it less likely that you’ll jump ship to something less exciting but more lucrative (similar to how game industry devs tend to make less than regular software engineers, from what I’ve heard—you can exploit people’s enthusiasm), and the fact that it’s a cool job means everyone else is also trying to do it (also not unlike the game industry—if you won’t take the job for subpar pay, there’s ten other people lined up who will). There’s a lot of competition, and that subtly devalues your own work, even if the work you do is better than your peers’. Also, not at all to denigrate what my non-technical writer friends do, but jobs that are “just” writing get flooded with applicants because everyone thinks they can write. The barrier to entry is, ostensibly, pretty low, even if most people are poorer writers than they realize and even if most writing jobs require skills beyond simply writing. Although lately I have seen an influx of people with no experience in the software industry or related tools assuming that it’s easy to break into technical writing; I wonder if the job’s been showing up on those “10 Easy Roles Anyone Can Do From Home” listicles or something. You do have to be a competent writer, of course, but half of my job is working on pull requests and building awful little React components for our docs site.
- akiselev 3y ago
  > In some ways it does seem like the perceived glamor of these jobs is a double-edged sword: the allure of what you do makes it less likely that you’ll jump ship to something less exciting but more lucrative (similar to how game industry devs tend to make less than regular software engineers, from what I’ve heard—you can exploit people’s enthusiasm), and the fact that it’s a cool job means everyone else is also trying to do it (also not unlike the game industry—if you won’t take the job for subpar pay, there’s ten other people lined up who will). There’s a lot of competition, and that subtly devalues your own work, even if the work you do is better than your peers’. I see this phenomenon all over the place: the gaming industry, airline and freight pilots, silicon engineers, telecom, etc. The dynamics of each industry are subtly different but the end result is the same: employers are able to exploit workers and push down wages because their employees are motivated and there's no where else to go. Want to make games or fly airplanes for a living? All of the companies compete in the same cut throat industries. Want to design cutting edge silicon fabs or RF radios? There's only two choices: TSMC and Intel or Qualcomm and Broadcom, respectively. Good luck. The AMA had it right: you gotta cut off the supply of job learning opportunities and squeeze the market for all its worth.
mjfl 3y ago
Why does everyone have to hyper-specialize? Why is it normal to be a writer a nothing else? You mean you have no life experience outside of sitting at your word processor? You're gonna be a boring writer, no matter what you write about.
1attice 3y ago
The problem with this article is that it allows the word 'writing' to cover so much ground it means practically nothing; butter spread over too much toast. It's like talking about the "market for painters" and never clarifying if you mean the Home Depot kind of the Van Gogh kind (or for that matter, the guy operating the enamel sprayer at the Le Cruset factory.) When 'writing' is understood in a more limited context, this article is fine. Clickbait writing is a terrible career, precisely because of the economics the author describes. Yet this says nothing about, say, doing longform journalism --- well, that's at terrible career as well, most likely, but probably for very different reasons than the ones this article plumbs: not because "writing doesn't scale" (the author bemoans not being able to produce more than five or six articles an hour!) but because _creating truth and beauty has always been a renumeratively thankless task._ While there are eras (the heyday of rock n roll for music; the heyday of Condé-Nast-style longform journalism) and people (Leonard Cohen; Ta-Nehisi Coates) that prove there are exceptions to the rule, it remains a truism that unregulated markets, in general, are bad at nurturing minds. This is why universities and musical conservatories were created in the first place. Get thee to a faculty! It does not surprise me that the author wound up in fintech -- that sounds like a great fit, actually, for someone who explicitly experiences 'writing' (or what the author experiences as writing) as analogous to iron mining. No shade thrown either: that's a valuable mindset! But it's not the one that produces (sparkle emoji) Writing (sparkle emoji).
- the-printer 3y ago
  And what do you mean by "(sparkle emoji) Writing (sparkle emoji)"?
  - 1attice 3y ago
    Whatever TS Eliot got up to
    - spadros 3y ago
      I disagree with your premise. There’s masterful tech docs and terrible fan fiction. Comparing one to a barn and the other to Van Gogh is meaningless.
forshadowing_ 3y ago
[dead]
biscuits1 3y ago
The writer's last paragraph(s) tell the whole story. In fact, I'd argue better writers tell their punch lines last, so start there first.
nkg 3y ago
"The only thing that made it fun was the challenge of a deadline" I have felt this way about coding for a web agency.

169 points by mathgenius 3y ago

For someone that does not have English as a native language. Do you think Chat GPT could act as editor? Basically correcting grammatical mistakes and similar?

throwaway33381 3y ago
No. People have tried to use Grammarly for this. Using Chat GPT as a linter for writing is a terrible idea and I wouldn't suggest anyone use it. I wouldn't be surprised if Chat GPT hallucinated suggestions and problems in writing. For business writing on the other hand, maybe. For basic things it could be helpful. But it might cause a lot more unnecessary confusion. While looking as though you understand more than you do. What I mean by this is that instead of being confused as a misinterpretation by a secondary language speaker. Instead it will look as though you intentionally meant to say something someway. This sounds vague, because there are lots of issues that could possible occur. And this is the worst one I could think of off the top of my head. We see some people already using it to automate certain sections such as emails in their life, and well.. Good luck. It could easily write something you didn't want it to or say something you didn't mean because you didn't look closely at what you were writing. There's a lot of terrible consequences of this technology and to call it a productivity hack is well, not ideal.
dan-robertson 3y ago
It’s pretty good at getting the grammar right. My guess is that it would be good at checking yours. The prose it produces isn’t great.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > It’s pretty good at getting the grammar right. My guess is that it would be good at checking yours. Writing something that fits the pattern of correct English is a very different thing for a tool to do than identifying and explaining what’s wrong with something with errors; ChatGPT by design is focused on the first, not the second. OTOH, grammar checkers are a thing, and if you have sub-native (or even just not-particularly-formally-polished native) proficiency in a language, they are definitely quite useful (well, at least the better ones for English are), you don’t need AI for this.
john-tells-all 3y ago
I tried to have Copilot extend my technical writing article. It was very fast... at writing very positive-sounding gibberish. Possibly with a better prompt it would be better.

Animats 3y ago

(2018). By someone who wrote clickbait for a living. Crushed when search engine companies figured out how to filter clickbait better. All this is pre-GPT, too. "So, tech bloggers can become venture capitalists. But what do politics and entertainment bloggers become? Mostly alcoholics."

TehShrike 3y ago
He's now the author of a very successful newsletter: https://www.thediff.co/ https://www.thediff.co/

poulsbohemian 3y ago

My partner is a freelance copywriter / editor. Despite all the talk about how AI is going to take her job, she’s more in demand than ever. She has companies begging her to come on full time, but makes good coin freelancing and gets to set her own schedule that way. One of the challenges I observe is that a lot of people get hired into marketing roles because they are high-energy project managers - but they don’t know how to write, ironically. So there is an opportunity to be the grunt behind the scenes cranking out all the different types of content needed in corporate America. Also - in many industries there are rules and regulations about what you can say, how and when you can say it. Knowing those nuances also adds to your value.

yamtaddle 3y ago
My wife's employer has experimented with ChatGPT writing. Their experience has been it's way slower to use it in any but very limited ways, and having non-writers/editors try to use it to do the job of writers it is a disaster. I think you need just the right combo of task and worker to actually see a notable speed improvement from it... unless the job is "write huge amounts of bullshit", which some jobs truly are (astroturfing, certain kinds of advertising or marketing, scams). [EDIT] I should add that this isn't preventing them from hyping the effects externally. I'd be wary of companies' claims re: the effectiveness of AI. They're all afraid of being seen as having missed the train, even if the train's not really going where they need to go.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I've experimented myself and it's been vaguely helpful to create some stubs and to provide some boilerplate a bit faster than I could have generated myself. But I can't say I've found it genuinely useful for anything I want to be even workmanlike product on the other end.
- grumpymouse 3y ago
  It’s probably the same deal as with LLMs generating code: it can crank out something that’s probably broken, and the person using the LLM needs to be able to know how to code to see where it’s broken. Companies might be able to reduce the headcount of programmers / copywriters / artists but certainly not replace them right now (or possibly ever).

j2kun 3y ago

For the HN crowd there's probably a more realistic path toward writing as a career: self-publishing technical books. [By one year after publishing my first book](https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programmers-introduction-to-mathematics/ https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programme...), I had sold 11k copies, and with self publishing you get a much bigger royalty from each copy, drastically lowering the bar for financial success. I expect my second book to do even better, because my audience has only grown since then and the book is more general purpose. I might be an outlier in that I have already built up a large audience from blogging about math. But the benefit of self-publishing, aiming your work at folks with disposable income, and having a niche all seem to make a full-time writing job quite straightforward.

Throw73849 3y ago
Another option is to write documentation for opensource projects. Many have some sort of funding, but not good doc.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from doing this. But there's some cachet to having your name on a book cover compared to being an unsung writer of docs. (Self-published vs. through a publisher is another more complicated discussion with both pros and cons on both sides.)
tayo42 3y ago
Just a general question, how do you know the topic is even worth writing a book about? Like spending a year working on it then watch the book fail. That would really suck. I guess in general, how do you know you have something interesting and captivating to say. Edit:for the weird auto completes
- ghaff 3y ago
  For starters, you need to define what you consider success and failure. If it's to make a ton of money, you should probably reconsider your options right there. If it's to spend a bunch of time learning and thinking about a topic that may be something else. If it's just a fun side project (just wrapping up another one of those), that's fine too.

ghaff 3y ago

Unfortunately he saves the best bits for the very end. - There's definitely a conflict between being entertainment/provocative/etc. and "Just the facts maam." - For most people writing is most valuable in support of something else. Don't write a tech book for the royalty checks. But because of some combination of learning about a topic/you want to/it will enhance your career.

paulpauper 3y ago

Funny how people keep saying writing is a terrible career yet so many want to do it. Most careers are not that good, tbh: low pay, bad work conditions, and or lots of hours. Top Substack authors earning salaries comparable to STEM execs, but have a platform (which is also worth a lot), full autonomy, as well as extra income from books and affiliate links etc. Not bad work if you can get it.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago
>Everybody want to be a bodybuilder but nobody want to lift no heavy ass weight - Ronnie Coleman Everybody wants a high or cool status job, but few truly want to suffer what it takes to get that job, and in the case of writing, as with many things, there's too much luck involved, too strong a power law.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  Even people who get the jobs suffer from them. I've met a lot of journalists and I live in fantasy land compared to them. In exchange for a small amount of meaning, they take on a lot of extra suffering.
- laratied 3y ago
  Ronnie Coleman also can't walk anymore on his own because of those heavy weights. That could certainly apply in this context if talking 20 years down the line.
idontpost 3y ago
[dead]
spadros 3y ago
The point is it’s incredibly hard to get the the good work. It’s not bad, if you can survive the insane competition. Which most, by definition, cannot.
Falkon1313 3y ago
Not many jobs still pay you for the work you did a month, a year, 10 years, or 25 years ago. Not many jobs pay you just to sit at home and make up stories either. Of course many people want a job like that. But the actual day-to-day doing of it, well, that's quite another thing. And most of us just aren't cut out to be an Agatha Christie, Stephen King, or Isaac Asimov. You see some of that in music and similar things as well. For every AC/DC or Guns N' Roses, there were a million garage bands who worked hard but were lucky to get a gig at a local dive bar or a family member's wedding. That never stopped people from wanting to do it though.

papito 3y ago

I used it to write a cover letter. Saved me a whole day! I hate writing cover letters. And of course I had to read it to make sure I was not a COBOL expert.

akhayam 3y ago

Let me provide an adjacent perspective: I started my career as an academic and excellent writing was survival in that jungle. While that's a profession where research and writing can actually "pay your bills" (metaphorically), it resembled Liu Cixin's dark forest: “The (academic) universe is a dark forest. Every civilization (professor / grad student) is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care." Profs and students would poach ideas, submit before the research was even complete blatantly violate double-blind reviews, and submit to multiple venues in parallel (a huge no-no in academic publishing). Arvix is the only silver lining on that cloud: https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Honestly what you describe is not dissimilar to how some engineers behaved at e.g. Google around projects and perf process. I'm not sure if they learn it in academia, or if the perf process is inspired by academia, or if it's just... human nature ... to create reward systems that amplify credit-stealing and fame seeking. But it sucks. And there's whole demographics of people who think it's normal.
- akhayam 3y ago
  I feel it's all rooted in bad leadership. Leaders who don't understand who's actually doing the work hire more folks like them and then there is a chain reaction. Unfortunate, but true, part of most big companies.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    The performance review process at e.g. Google explicitly promotes credit and fame seeking. Recognition and "impact", especially cross-team, are called out as critical. You will not advance there without it. I saw plenty of projects get derailed by this. Technical goals in general take the back seat to presentation goals.

lucasgonze 3y ago

Growing up I envisioned myself as a writer. When I got old enough to test that out I found out the truth of this writer's piece: I was well-known but painfully poor. My girlfriend asked "what are you doing this for?" and I couldn't answer. I reset my career vision to writing creative code and everything turned around. Adulthood is crap except when it isn't.

hbrn 3y ago
"You should only write when you feel within you some completely new and important content, clear to you but unintelligible to others, and when the need to express this content gives you no peace."
- lucasgonze 3y ago
  Any time you write you create noise for others. You shouldn't do that unless the information you are offering is valuable to them. Your writing can't be about you. It has to serve the reader.
  - hbrn 3y ago
    I strongly disagree, though I'm not a writer, so I'll just give you another quote (from "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser): Soon after you confront the matter of preserving your identity, another question will occur to you: “Who am I writing for?” It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.
    - lucasgonze 3y ago
      Which came first, the supply or the demand?
- 3y ago

rahimnathwani 3y ago

If you're into finance and tech, you should subscribe to his newsletter: https://www.thediff.co/ https://www.thediff.co/ Even the free version has good content.

coldcode 3y ago

In high school, college, and in my 20's a wrote a lot, but I didn't like it enough to do it as a career. Instead I spent my life writing code and wrote a programming blog for almost 15 years that used to appear some on Hacker News (https://thecodist.com https://thecodist.com). I recently revived it because I like writing and now have time. I never tried to make money on it; it's just fun writing about programming and technology. Writing for a living would have been much less fun than doing programming for all those years and paying a lot less. I read a lot so I am glad there are people who still write for a living. Sadly the internet started off free, and now we are stuck with ads everywhere and paying writers a decent wage is becoming harder.

spondylosaurus 3y ago

I have some thoughts on this as a career writer who’s friends with plenty of other career writers—but most of those friends write the kind of content discussed here, whereas I'm a technical writer who works on software documentation (hence why I'm on HN :P). Technical writers do pretty well; we don’t make as much as engineers, but the pay is nothing to sneeze at. My friends who write blog posts, industry reports, and other corporate content (also usually in the software industry) do reasonably well too. But all the other writers I know are struggling. What’s interesting to me is that the struggling writers have jobs that most people would find more exciting than what I do: they write essays, or fiction, or they’re journalists at Conde Nast publications. Unless you’re a particular kind of nerd, interviewing SMEs and writing quickstart guides is a lot less glamorous than interviewing public figures and having your name featured in bylines. In some ways it does seem like the perceived glamor of these jobs is a double-edged sword: the allure of what you do makes it less likely that you’ll jump ship to something less exciting but more lucrative (similar to how game industry devs tend to make less than regular software engineers, from what I’ve heard—you can exploit people’s enthusiasm), and the fact that it’s a cool job means everyone else is also trying to do it (also not unlike the game industry—if you won’t take the job for subpar pay, there’s ten other people lined up who will). There’s a lot of competition, and that subtly devalues your own work, even if the work you do is better than your peers’. Also, not at all to denigrate what my non-technical writer friends do, but jobs that are “just” writing get flooded with applicants because everyone thinks they can write. The barrier to entry is, ostensibly, pretty low, even if most people are poorer writers than they realize and even if most writing jobs require skills beyond simply writing. Although lately I have seen an influx of people with no experience in the software industry or related tools assuming that it’s easy to break into technical writing; I wonder if the job’s been showing up on those “10 Easy Roles Anyone Can Do From Home” listicles or something. You do have to be a competent writer, of course, but half of my job is working on pull requests and building awful little React components for our docs site.

akiselev 3y ago
> In some ways it does seem like the perceived glamor of these jobs is a double-edged sword: the allure of what you do makes it less likely that you’ll jump ship to something less exciting but more lucrative (similar to how game industry devs tend to make less than regular software engineers, from what I’ve heard—you can exploit people’s enthusiasm), and the fact that it’s a cool job means everyone else is also trying to do it (also not unlike the game industry—if you won’t take the job for subpar pay, there’s ten other people lined up who will). There’s a lot of competition, and that subtly devalues your own work, even if the work you do is better than your peers’. I see this phenomenon all over the place: the gaming industry, airline and freight pilots, silicon engineers, telecom, etc. The dynamics of each industry are subtly different but the end result is the same: employers are able to exploit workers and push down wages because their employees are motivated and there's no where else to go. Want to make games or fly airplanes for a living? All of the companies compete in the same cut throat industries. Want to design cutting edge silicon fabs or RF radios? There's only two choices: TSMC and Intel or Qualcomm and Broadcom, respectively. Good luck. The AMA had it right: you gotta cut off the supply of job learning opportunities and squeeze the market for all its worth.

mjfl 3y ago

Why does everyone have to hyper-specialize? Why is it normal to be a writer a nothing else? You mean you have no life experience outside of sitting at your word processor? You're gonna be a boring writer, no matter what you write about.

1attice 3y ago

The problem with this article is that it allows the word 'writing' to cover so much ground it means practically nothing; butter spread over too much toast. It's like talking about the "market for painters" and never clarifying if you mean the Home Depot kind of the Van Gogh kind (or for that matter, the guy operating the enamel sprayer at the Le Cruset factory.) When 'writing' is understood in a more limited context, this article is fine. Clickbait writing is a terrible career, precisely because of the economics the author describes. Yet this says nothing about, say, doing longform journalism --- well, that's at terrible career as well, most likely, but probably for very different reasons than the ones this article plumbs: not because "writing doesn't scale" (the author bemoans not being able to produce more than five or six articles an hour!) but because _creating truth and beauty has always been a renumeratively thankless task._ While there are eras (the heyday of rock n roll for music; the heyday of Condé-Nast-style longform journalism) and people (Leonard Cohen; Ta-Nehisi Coates) that prove there are exceptions to the rule, it remains a truism that unregulated markets, in general, are bad at nurturing minds. This is why universities and musical conservatories were created in the first place. Get thee to a faculty! It does not surprise me that the author wound up in fintech -- that sounds like a great fit, actually, for someone who explicitly experiences 'writing' (or what the author experiences as writing) as analogous to iron mining. No shade thrown either: that's a valuable mindset! But it's not the one that produces (sparkle emoji) Writing (sparkle emoji).

the-printer 3y ago
And what do you mean by "(sparkle emoji) Writing (sparkle emoji)"?
- 1attice 3y ago
  Whatever TS Eliot got up to
  - spadros 3y ago
    I disagree with your premise. There’s masterful tech docs and terrible fan fiction. Comparing one to a barn and the other to Van Gogh is meaningless.

forshadowing_ 3y ago

[dead]

biscuits1 3y ago

The writer's last paragraph(s) tell the whole story. In fact, I'd argue better writers tell their punch lines last, so start there first.

nkg 3y ago

"The only thing that made it fun was the challenge of a deadline" I have felt this way about coding for a web agency.