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Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)

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

#91

Post by bryanrasmussen »

safety1st wrote: post #87
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is knocking down straw men a regular thing for you?

I'm sorry - you mean that you find it unlikely that people claim copyright should run out at 10 years on HN? I thought it was well-known enough that I didn't have to go through the hundreds of copyright threads to find examples.

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

#92

Post by sirsinsalot »

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).

> 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.

Same with my junior devs

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

#93

Post by sirsinsalot »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #91
safety1st wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is knocking down straw men a regular thing for you?

I'm sorry - you mean that you find it unlikely that people claim copyright should run out at 10 years on HN? I thought it was well-known enough that I didn't have to go through the hundreds of copyright threads to find examples.

HN, where everyone uses fallacy arguments to sound smart, prop up their delicate egos and feel like they contribute value

... without actually adding any!

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

#94

Post by bryanrasmussen »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #93
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry - you mean that you find it unlikely that people claim copyright should run out at 10 years on HN? I thought it was well-known enough that I didn't have to go through the hundreds of copyright threads to find examples.

HN, where everyone uses fallacy arguments to sound smart, prop up their delicate egos and feel like they contribute value ... without actually adding any!

okey-dokey, valued HN-member.

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

#95

Post by maaanu »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #92
grumpymouse wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> 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. Same with my junior devs

I see this claim so often and I fail to understand it every time... What kind of junior devs do you hire, where this is the case? And what kind of tasks do you give them?

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

#96

Post by coldtea »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #93
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry - you mean that you find it unlikely that people claim copyright should run out at 10 years on HN? I thought it was well-known enough that I didn't have to go through the hundreds of copyright threads to find examples.

HN, where everyone uses fallacy arguments to sound smart, prop up their delicate egos and feel like they contribute value ... without actually adding any!

Sums this comment up perfectly: zero-content and basically pissing on other people.

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

#97

Post by MichaelZuo »

ido wrote: post #84
bloppe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there are significant anticompetitive forces in your industry, unfair compensation is simply not a stable state. Since the gaming industry is very large and many upstarts seem to find success, how can the prevailing wages be considered unfair? Everybody would have a profit motive to quit their employer and become a greedy exec themselves.

Probably a lot fewer upstarts find success than you imagine - it may seem like "a lot" but the rate of success is abysmal. It's hard to get accurate statistics because it's not obvious what to count, but from the attempts I've read it's somewhat over 90% of games that do not breakeven and has been this way since the early 90s at least (probably earlier but it's even harder to find data the further back you go). The v…

Well in that case is it also unfair if someone, highly interested in exotic sports cars, can't afford a Ferrari on their salary?

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

#98

Post by MichaelZuo »

akiselev wrote: post #37
spondylosaurus wrote: post #32

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…

> 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 tryin…

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.

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

#99

Post by cmrdporcupine »

akhayam wrote: post #80
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The performance review process at e.g. Google explicitly promotes credit and fame seeking. Recognition and "impact", especially cross-team, are called out as critical. You will not advance there without it.

I saw plenty of projects get derailed by this. Technical goals in general take the back seat to presentation goals.

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

#100

Post by laratied »

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

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.

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