My Year in Review: 2019

It's almost like a blank cheque in terms of following your interests. Sure, you need to cover the routine stuff on your beat. But the Times is among the few that can and will still devote enormous resources to go deep on issues that matter. And as the editor, you're basically who gets to decide what matters.

In terms of social standing, her job would probably outrank anyone except CXOs at FAANG, at least in my social group.

Even for salary, it's among the few positions in journalism that is competitive with tech. I seem to remember mid 6-figure salaries being quoted in the past, although there is probably high variety, with some editors and authors being their own sort-of "brand".

The only downside is that you don't get to write code if that happens to be your passion. In that regard, it's similar to transitioning to management in tech. But the Times has been doing quite a lot of data journalism and interactive storytelling and the like. So if you really want to, you could probably come up with ideas that get you back into a text editor at least some of the time.

Anyway, it's well that she sounds cheerful. She seems to have been quite good at what she did in tech, and I hope that she will consider going back to it.

[edit: corrected spelling of "observers"]

She got a job at Stripe after leaving Uber. I expect that she chose to work for the NYT.

Some people will certainly regard you as a red flag (which is good, because you will not want to work for those) but others will hold you in higher regard or even first get to know of you because of what you did and the publicity surrounding that.

Since job interviews are so much about standing out from all other candidates, having done something outstanding seems like an excellent way to increase your chances of getting a job.

You don't have to be liked by many. You just have to really click with a few. Being meh for everyone is when the job search gets really hard.

You also have to face the idea, that maybe you actually don't want to write. HN is obsessed with writing for the sole reason that it ostensibly builds clout and ultimately makes you more money and validates you as "an important person".

If after all of this, you still want to write, but you really don't have a strong opinion or idea, choose a topic, research it, and share it.

Also, again maybe you need to expand your interests and try and pick an ideology so that you have opinions on things. Listen to a lot of people/podcasts/books with strong opinions, form friend groups with people with strong opinions, fight them on their ideas by researching counters to their opinions. Take stances and argue from a position that you don't believe, etc. This could be anything from gender in tech, to free markets vs regulated markets, to TDD is good vs TDD is bad, to Remote is good vs Remote is bad, etc, etc.

Interviewer: Where did that [ability to write] come from? I mean, did you begin writing for school – all of a sudden in third grade you got this delight?"

Sapolsky: Naaa...

Sapolsky: [...] I was OK with writing, and throughout college I didn't have a writer's block. So I had friends who would pull their hair out over it, and that was sort the central organizing emphasis of their life, and I never had a writer’s block. It was something that I was OK at, but nothing I took any great pleasure in. I never took a literature class in college, or any English course or anything.

And I was not particularly into writing, and it was not until after I finished college—right after, a week after graduation—I went off to Africa for a year and a half to begin to get my field work started, which I have been doing ever since for twenty-five years and it was fairly isolated site, where a lot of the time I was by myself. I would go 8 to 10 hours a day without speaking to anyone, I would get a mail drop about once every two weeks or so, there was no electricity, there was no radio, there was no anything, and I suddenly got unbelievably, frantically dependent on mail. So as a result you wind up sending letters to every human that you have known in your life in hopes that they would write back to you.

So what would happen is, all I could afford at the time were like these one-page aerogram things that you could sort of get in these big stacks, and something vaguely interesting would happen every couple of days or so. So you would write to somebody about it, and then you would write to the next person about it, and you would realize that before the end of the day, you had just written 25 versions of it, each of which was a page and a half long. [...]

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/howiwrite/Transcripts/Sapolsky...