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.
Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
51–60 of 111 posts
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#52For 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?
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.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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—eve…
Which came first, the supply or the demand?
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#54I 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…
> 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.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#55Earlier 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…
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.
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.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#56Funny 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.
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Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#57For 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…
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...
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#58"The only thing that made it fun was the challenge of a deadline"
I have felt this way about coding for a web agency.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#59For 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…
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.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#60For 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
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.