It's funny to see this in The New Yorker, because I was under the impression that The New Yorker was an elite publication where all writers aspired to be published.

Perhaps this is supposed to be the joke, since the article is labeled as humor, but I don't think that being a writer, even in the New Yorker, has the same prestige nowadays that it used to have before media became "democratized", so the joke is actually quite sad.

Realistically, the author probably should have been smart enough to realize that careers in the arts are the domain of the idle rich, and learned how to code.