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Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

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Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

#21

Post by VoodooJuJu »

paulpauper wrote: post #13

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.

>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.

Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

#22

Post by hbrn »

lucasgonze wrote: post #18

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."

Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

#23

Post by hluska »

tayo42 wrote: post #9
j2kun wrote: post #5

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, b…

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

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.

Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

#24

Post by SuoDuanDao »

j2kun wrote: post #5

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, b…

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.

Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

#25

Post by lucasgonze »

hbrn wrote: post #22
lucasgonze wrote: post #18

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.

Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

#26

Post by hbrn »

lucasgonze wrote: post #25
hbrn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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.

Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

#27

Post by markdestouches »

hbrn wrote: post #22
lucasgonze wrote: post #18

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. "

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.

Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

#28

Post by visarga »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

#29

Post by ptdn »

grumpymouse wrote: post #17
yamtaddle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (a…

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 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.

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