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.
> 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),
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.
I agree, I dislike the use of "exploit" in this context because it sounds like enthusiastic people are mindlessly accepting these poor paying jobs. I like to believe that they know exactly what they're getting into, why it pays less, and they are taking the job for other reasons such as the ones you've named: prestige and glamour.
I think where it gets to be frustrating is fields where even the "dull" side of it is hollowed out. My original career plan was Japanese translation. I wasn't nursing any fantasies of doing literary translation or games or anything else fun but even then the pay sucked the few times I managed to get work and I decided computers seemed like a better option.
> 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.
There are 2 sides to this coin. Jobs with too much interest are discounted, but jobs with not enough interest pay extra. I'd rather live in a society where this is the case than in one where market pressure is distorted to the point that important yet under-appealing roles cannot be filled.
I disagree the use of the word 'exploit' in this sense. It's certainly not a secret there aren't many companies competing with Broadcom or Qualcomm, I doubt even a naive 22 year old college grad could miss that.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
My partner is an editor too and ChatGPT is a force multiplier for her. Read in an AI-transcripted interview, paste into ChatGPT with the instructions to word it as an article, and then rewrite it checking for accuracy.
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.
Same happened in a data labelling department. The presumption is that now NLP is a "solved" task, but funnily there is more work than ever. Same happens to the ML engineers.
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-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.
Specifying technical books is interesting - my first book was fairly technical (though the spiritual theme which probably reduced the target market significantly) but my most successful books monetarily were far and away the erotica I wrote primarily for my own gratification. I know erotica's an active genre, but it's still a source of consternation that I get so much more reader interest for something so much easier and less meaningful.
Having written erotica on the side while working a day job where I write technical content, I truthfully find it much more difficult to write erotica. :P Props to you for doing it skillfully enough to get paid!
I self-published eight (non-technical) books. They sell reasonably well, at least by Czech standards (just 10 million speakers), but the first one sold the best, around 10 thousand copies. The latest one only sold some 2500 so far.
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.
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.
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.
I used to publish and have some anecdata you may find encouraging. In my experience, if you’re thoughtful enough to wonder if you have something interesting to say, you likely do.
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.
To some extent, this is true of many things where you do work in advance and then try to sell it. That’s just what a lot of business is. In this case I assume the author got a lot of feedback over the years in the form of ‘I’m a programmer and I liked your article and I always wanted to learn mathematics and never learned how’. And, like, that sort of thing doesn’t mean writing a book on the topic would be successful, but it does seem like a bit of a hint.
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.
There is a huge selection bias when talking about something like this.
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.
It's hard for me to pin it down, but after blogging for 10+ years and working on my second book now, I kind of just have a good feeling for what will work. The topic and my approach to it feels true and speaks to my experience.
Let us evaluate. You work at Google. On encryption. And have the time and energy to write books on the side and you don't consider yourself an outlier? Please...
Notice how they're always some FAANG guy in these kinds of discussions saying something like:
"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".
is this perhaps the same guy who says "I think you should lose the copyright for those books you wrote after 10 years, so if you don't make any money on them before that sucks to be you!"
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.
Regular publishers have a bit different approach: they contact like 5 potential authors at the same time, ask each to write a book, pay small advance payment (~5k) then wait 1 year and pick 1 book to publish. 1 author maybe gets paid something, 4 authors just wasted 1 year of their time.
That hasn't been my experience. It's been that publishers pay less than that but do publish books that are delivered in a publishable form. But doesn't change the fact that most authors make next to nothing especially on things like technically-oriented books that have zero possibility of being best-sellers.
Which may be fine for some purposes but not if you're banking on a hit.
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.)
You are not exactly outliner as I had calculated that it would take 11k copies to make a living assuming that you are selling a weekly newsletter to the same audience.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
I wouldn’t compare technical writing and fiction writing as painting a barn to painting a Van Gogh. It’s a bit hyperbolic. There’s masterfully written technical docs and terrible Sherlock Holmes erotica. I wouldn’t compare the Holmes Erotica to Van Gogh.
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.
"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."
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.
This moment will never come if you just sit and wait for it. Practice in writing is just as important as in coding. Unfortunately, as many great arts of the past, writing is dying due to the publics' interest shifting away from reading (reading fiction in particular) to something else.
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). 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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
- 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 reset my career vision to writing creative code and everything turned around. Adulthood is crap except when it isn't.
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.