Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
byrnehobart.medium.com
byrnehobart.medium.com
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.
I used to be a game developer and you're exactly right.
People tend to frame this observation in a negative way, but I hate that mindset because it portrays employees as lacking agency. The way I look at it is that people choose jobs based on the total compensation package: salary, bonus, on-site perks, coworkers, work environment, meaning, social cachet, etc. All of those are meaningful and valuable to people.
Obviously, sure, it would be great to be paid six figures to work on a tropical island for a few hours a day applying sunscreen to models while the UN videoconferences with you to express their gratitude at how you're saving the environment. But, alas, those jobs are few and far between.
In reality, people make trade-offs and choose the jobs whose entire compensation package fits what they are trying to get out of their life. And, for a social species like Homo sapiens, it should come as no surprise that for many people, some of the most important parts of a compensation package are prestige and glamour. So when a job with a lot of social cachet (journalist, novelist, actor) doesn't actually pay that much in cash, that makes sense: it pays more in other aspects.
The vast majority of startup game studios go bankrupt within a couple years of founding and the vast majority of solo indie devs only release one game.
There is no international industry-wide wage-suppression conspiracy, the supply-demand equilibrium is simply at a lower wage level than non-games tech.
It can be "unfair" in an intuitive and specific case while still being the result of market forces (is it fair that I'm paying rent to my former landlord's son? he did nothing to earn it except inherit this building)
EDIT: I realize you were not claiming it was a conspiracy, I just wanted to correct a common perspective by industry outsiders that see a lot of success stories and think "how hard can it be?" - the world is big and the "many cases" you are seeing a tiny % of the whole, which are overwhelmingly unsuccessful.
Whether or not private inheritance is fair is a completely separate debate. We could do away with private inheritance, and all these market forces would still work to keep prices fair.
It's the same market forces.
> (is it fair that I'm paying rent to my former landlord's son? he did nothing to earn it except inherit this building)
has a clear answer.
> I don’t know what point you think I was trying to make, but I don’t think it is the same one I was thinking of.
1. Machine translation is not a replacement for a human translator... but it's good enough to muddle through for some people that they'd rather not pay. If not, a lot of times they'd rather pay someone to edit MT than for a scratch translation. I've never done this, but to hear others tell it, it's not that much less work but it pays worse.
2. Sites like Gengo and Fiverr have popped up ensuring you're competing with people who are desperate or not doing it as their main job. I did work for Gengo and a surprising amount of work from prestigious companies or requiring a lot of nuance (contract translations, for instance) came through on the basic tier. That was interesting to work on but if people are feeding that stuff into a service like that, it speaks to how little they value good translation work. Unfortunately there weren't enough jobs that this was even slightly consistent so it wasn't a great way to make money even at their low, gig-work rates.
I have zero interest in going back. If you're interested to hear more from people who are still doing it, this community seems to be somewhat active with real, working translators: https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/
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.
It would be a different story if they were duped into believing they're somehow hot-stuff and dozens of companies will jump to recruit them for their passion.
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.
ChatGPT wrote the function perfectly on the first shot, but then I realized it was only working most of the time -- turned out ChatGPT had done a really obvious off-by-one error in the loop, and it was breaking on (1/n) attempts where n is the size of the list.
It's exactly the same as how ChatGPT usually knows what formulas and approaches to take when solving graduate-level mathematics, and its reasoning about the problem is pretty good, but it can't get the right answer because it can't add integers reliably.
Something that experienced (and expensive) programmers are good at, incidentally.
Full transparency: I think I'm one of those bad programmers who is a good debugger, but I've also been a full-time Linux nerd since Ubuntu 8.04, so I'm very comfortable reading error messages.
And writing code is the easy part. Architecting is where things get tricky and there are a lot of subjective decisions to be made. That's where soft skills become really important.
Same with my junior devs
If you are going to use ChatGPT for writing, you would have to hire an army of fact-checkers, because it can literally fake citations.
She caught a dozen or so of her students cheating (via chatgpt) by looking for hallucinated papers in the bibliographies.
I think AI chatbots will do much like what, say, engineering modeling tools have done for engineering: do 80% of the grunt work for you, and only require human supervision.
It's ultimately a good thing for writing, because writing will be less expensive to produce. The downside is probably SEO spam, but it is what it is.
[By one year after publishing my first book](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.
This might be a post-Covid effect, though. During Covid, books sold well, people were probably bored. Post-Covid, with high inflation kicking in (we are around 17 per cent in Czechia), people reduced their cultural expenses first: food and energies are more important.
That said, I found the combination of being a programmer and a writer fairly efficient. Being able to write documentation in detail beforehand means that I discover a lot of subtle problems and corner cases before I actually implement something. And, as a practising writer, writing documentation feels easy to me, a natural flow.
Edit:for the weird auto completes
But, there's nothing quite as satisfying as setting out to do something really difficult and seeing it come together. And unlike most other things in your career where you're part of a team and sharing your success, a book basically rests solely on your shoulders. So it's easy to point to it and truthfully say "I did that".
Plus, it turned me into a really good writer.
Aside from that bit of data, there is one definite advantage to writing. The process of writing a book is a great way to learn more and get better at explaining what you know. This is a double edged sword because if you spend six months on a first draft, you will likely see a major difference in quality between the first section you wrote and the last.
You may make some money, but you’ll almost certainly learn something.
I think in general the answers might be something like ‘look for clues’ or ‘try to get feedback on whether the idea is good early’ but I also think a lot of the time it’s just people writing books they want to write or that they guess people will be interested in. But I’m definitely guessing and I don’t really know.
Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential is one of my fav books but he wrote two books before Kitchen Confidential that were utter failures. I am not sure how successful some of his later works were either.
Even a masterpiece that people would love could be a total failure with bad timing and poor marketing.
"so you've earned 50K for a year work on writing that book? dude that's like $x/hour, I earn a $300K wage + 1 million in stocks per year, and they have a private cook and gymnast at the FAANGplex for me and everything".
on edit: of course not particularly relevant to most tech books but still it is sort of a bad look that nearly everybody on HN is wild about.
... without actually adding any!
Which may be fine for some purposes but not if you're banking on a hit.
Would love to hear more about your launch tools.
There is also that myth-might-be-true thing of selling to developers book-wise means that you are targeting two groups those who cannot afford 2nd screens and those who can...i.e. print copy and electronic copies should be at different prices.
You can pick up an extra monitor at a thrift store for around 10 bucks. My 2nd monitor came from a thrift store. I use it for displaying the manual while I'm working.
“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/.
But it sucks. And there's whole demographics of people who think it's normal.
I saw plenty of projects get derailed by this. Technical goals in general take the back seat to presentation goals.
- 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.
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).
I make no claim about whether nor not tech docs can be masterful. It's weird of you to go in this direction?
I reset my career vision to writing creative code and everything turned around. Adulthood is crap except when it isn't.
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.If you're literally just doing nothing, I'd agree.
But I haven't felt the urge to write anything creatively in over 8 years. Last year, I met someone (my muse?) who sparked this desire in me.
Nowadays I spend much of me free time writing songs, lyrics and I'm working on a draft for a novel.
It's not like I do that because I expect to make money from it - it's because I have to in order to feel al peace.
Then, when the motivation returns, you'll have the skill to express what you really want to say.
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.
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.
Possibly with a better prompt it would be better.
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.
- 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.
That could certainly apply in this context if talking 20 years down the line.
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.
Even the free version has good content.
All this is pre-GPT, too.
"So, tech bloggers can become venture capitalists. But what do politics and entertainment bloggers become? Mostly alcoholics."