[HN Gopher] Writing: Good career move, terrible career
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Writing: Good career move, terrible career
Author : mathgenius
Score : 113 points
Date : 2023-05-14 10:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (byrnehobart.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (byrnehobart.medium.com)
| papito wrote:
| I used it to write a cover letter. Saved me a whole day! I hate
| writing cover letters. And of course I had to read it to make
| sure I was not a COBOL expert.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| 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.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| grumpymouse wrote:
| 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).
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Even if the code isn't broken the issue is that the vast
| majority of code isn't written in a vacuum. Refactoring,
| rearchitecting, etc. is quite tricky.
|
| 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.
| ptdn wrote:
| I suspect that a coordination between a human programmer
| and an LLM doesn't require strong programming skills, but
| it does require strong debugging fundamentals. A month ago
| I had ChatGPT write a function in Racket just given a text
| description. Take two lists of symbols of any arbitrary
| length (but only if both lists are the same size) and
| construct a new list which selects one at random from the
| other two lists at the same location. There was some other
| logic in there, too, based on the way I'd done the structs.
|
| 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.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> strong debugging fundamentals_
|
| Something that experienced (and expensive) programmers
| are good at, incidentally.
| ptdn wrote:
| Yes, of course. The only people with good debugging
| skills are the people who have spent a lot of time
| debugging their own code (or the code of others).
| However, in an LLM-dominated environment, it may be
| plausible for someone to develop strong debugging skills
| while having only mediocre programming skills. This would
| be similar to the "boot camp web developer" archetype who
| has reasonable skills only in a narrow domain.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| papito wrote:
| Non-native speakers use ChatGPT to fix the grammar, for
| example, but you would have to actually read it and check it.
|
| 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.
| josephg wrote:
| It absolutely will fake citations. An academic friend of
| mine intentionally wrote an essay topic for her students
| last semester where the students had to include references.
| She picked an essay topic where she knew ahead of time
| there were only 3 papers with relevant content.
|
| She caught a dozen or so of her students cheating (via
| chatgpt) by looking for hallucinated papers in the
| bibliographies.
| forshadowing_ wrote:
| [dead]
| mjfl wrote:
| Why does everyone have to hyper-specialize? Why is it normal to
| be a writer a nothing else? You mean you have no life experience
| outside of sitting at your word processor? You're gonna be a
| boring writer, no matter what you write about.
| mongol wrote:
| For someone that does not have English as a native language. Do
| you think Chat GPT could act as editor? Basically correcting
| grammatical mistakes and similar?
| throwaway33381 wrote:
| No. People have tried to use Grammarly for this. Using Chat GPT
| as a linter for writing is a terrible idea and I wouldn't
| suggest anyone use it. I wouldn't be surprised if Chat GPT
| hallucinated suggestions and problems in writing. For business
| writing on the other hand, maybe. For basic things it could be
| helpful. But it might cause a lot more unnecessary confusion.
| While looking as though you understand more than you do. What I
| mean by this is that instead of being confused as a
| misinterpretation by a secondary language speaker. Instead it
| will look as though you intentionally meant to say something
| someway. This sounds vague, because there are lots of issues
| that could possible occur. And this is the worst one I could
| think of off the top of my head.
|
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| (2018). By someone who wrote clickbait for a living. Crushed when
| search engine companies figured out how to filter clickbait
| better.
|
| All this is pre-GPT, too.
|
| _" So, tech bloggers can become venture capitalists. But what do
| politics and entertainment bloggers become? Mostly alcoholics."_
| TehShrike wrote:
| He's now the author of a very successful newsletter:
| https://www.thediff.co/
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| If you're into finance and tech, you should subscribe to his
| newsletter: https://www.thediff.co/
|
| Even the free version has good content.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Funny how people keep saying writing is a terrible career yet so
| many want to do it. Most careers are not that good, tbh: low pay,
| bad work conditions, and or lots of hours. Top Substack authors
| earning salaries comparable to STEM execs, but have a platform
| (which is also worth a lot), full autonomy, as well as extra
| income from books and affiliate links etc. Not bad work if you
| can get it.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >Everybody want to be a bodybuilder but nobody want to lift no
| heavy ass weight
|
| - 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.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Even people who get the jobs suffer from them. I've met a lot
| of journalists and I live in fantasy land compared to them.
| In exchange for a small amount of meaning, they take on a lot
| of extra suffering.
| lucasgonze wrote:
| 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.
| hbrn wrote:
| "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._ "
| markdestouches wrote:
| 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.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| The trick is getting started pursuing a hobby because you
| feel some mission, and practicing every day despite losing
| the motivation.
|
| Then, when the motivation returns, you'll have the skill to
| express what you really want to say.
| lucasgonze wrote:
| 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.
| hbrn wrote:
| I strongly disagree, though I'm not a writer, so I'll just
| give you another quote (from "On Writing Well" by William
| Zinsser): 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.
| lucasgonze wrote:
| Which came first, the supply or the demand?
| biscuits1 wrote:
| The writer's last paragraph(s) tell the whole story. In fact, I'd
| argue better writers tell their punch lines last, so start there
| first.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> 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.
| j2kun wrote:
| 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.
| fredgrott wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > those who cannot afford 2nd screens
|
| 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.
| tayo42 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Edit:for the weird auto completes
| hluska wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mprovost wrote:
| Totally agree. If you focus on the money you'll just be
| frustrated. I could have made more money spending those
| hours driving for Lyft instead. I deliberately haven't
| tracked my hours so I won't be discouraged at my hourly
| rate. Even spending that time on leetcode could get you a
| better job and more income.
|
| 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.
| batmaniam wrote:
| Do you only sell e-books? Or you self publish physical books
| too?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| He sells physical too, which you can see if you click through
| to purchase.
| coldtea wrote:
| 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".
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| 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.
| Throw73849 wrote:
| Another option is to write documentation for opensource
| projects. Many have some sort of funding, but not good doc.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| bitL wrote:
| 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.
| 1attice wrote:
| 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 Conde-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).
| the-printer wrote:
| And what do _you_ mean by "(sparkle emoji) Writing (sparkle
| emoji)"?
| akhayam wrote:
| 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).
|
| Arvix is the only silver lining on that cloud:
| https://arxiv.org/.
| coldcode wrote:
| 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.
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