Help Wanted at LWN
lwn.net
lwn.net
I am just idly wondering as I imagine a gilded life of tech journalism (which will be a million miles from the reality of deadline driven millstone)
But good luck to them - LWN always has the clearest explanation of "this is what the mile long thread on the mailing list means"
They don't need, and should not, optimize for other things.
It's almost a badge of honor to have your website be as minimal and stripped down as possible.
The undefeated champion of this of course is Dan Luu https://danluu.com/
Should kernel devs start commenting some of the more write-only parts of the kernel all on their lonesome, the lovely documentation people at LWN would find themselves out of a job and enjoying a deserved retirement!
I still remember when Steve Klabnik moved on from Mozilla he mentioned in a blog post [1] that he'd recently discovered he was the lowest-paid member of his team. I was simultaneously flabbergasted, because I felt that Steve's contribution to the Rust project was so huge that it was hard to imagine what the Rust experience would have been without him — and entirely unsurprised, because it's so typical of organisations to undervalue writing work.
Writing is communication. In my experience, in any endeavour involving more than one person, communication is the single biggest factor in success or failure. So... you know what I'm getting at: pay your communication specialists well.
People use and adopt the new features going into the kernel because of lwn. This is the medium where sagas like eBPF and io_uring play out & are heard of, where folks get inspired to use these capabilities.
Open source in particular needs these bards, to sing these artificer's epics.
Up to 140k as a technical writer sounds pretty amazing, although I imagine LWN is the "major leagues" of tech writing so this is probably a bit of an outlier in that field. I actually have an English degree and briefly considered tech writing as an option earlier in my career, but at the time it was far easier to find a career path in Sysadmin/Webmaster/Developer roles, and I've sadly never been able to use my writing skills professionally (outside of issues and emails, of course!)
Newspapers should have studied them as they grew.
How generous, they understand there are countries out there where software development specialists are accustomed to higher compensation than in USA. Hence the language used.