Ask HN: Hired to write, but mostly code, what to do? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Hired to write, but mostly code, what to do?

#11

Post by smeyer » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

natch wrote: post #5

You could outsource the writing portion of your work, as long as it doesn't involve anything confidential.

This also requires not having any moral qualms about misleading your employer. That's probably a bigger block than confidentiality for most people.

Re: Ask HN: Hired to write, but mostly code, what to do?

#12

Post by joeblau » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 6:04 PM UTC

Your company should have some sort of review process where they go over your performance and goals. These are usually the best places to express your passions and career path. If they don't have that, you can always try and seek out one of the leadership team members and request a 1 on 1. If the leadership is reasonable, it would make sense to keep you coding and hire someone else that is a little more jr. to do the writing. The financial compensation might be a little trickier, but I think you should be able to negotiate that accordingly as well.

Re: Ask HN: Hired to write, but mostly code, what to do?

#13

Post by atmosx » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 6:09 PM UTC

Out of curiosity are you in the states or Europe?

Re: Ask HN: Hired to write, but mostly code, what to do?

#14

Post by techmarketerguy » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 8:06 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #13

Out of curiosity are you in the states or Europe?

the states

Re: Ask HN: Hired to write, but mostly code, what to do?

#15

Post by jtfairbank » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 8:22 PM UTC

I'd just talk to them about it. Sounds like you are at a startup, so the likely hood is you will still have to write marketing content- everyone wears many hats. But they could compensate you as a developer instead of a marketer.

At my startup, I spend about 75% of my time working on sales because that is something we need to do, and I'm the best person to do it. As a coder at heart, I take an engineering approach to sales and use my coding skills to automate parts of the process.

Re: Ask HN: Hired to write, but mostly code, what to do?

#16

Post by tehwebguy » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 1:30 AM UTC

darkwulph03 wrote: post #4

I was in a similar boat with my last job doing Support/QA/Custom Development for 2 years while the "official" devs went off and made a new version of the product. About a year and a half in i brought it up and they agreed to move me out of support, but the pay raise wasn't nearly adequate for the duties expected. And I regretfully agreed to half raise now, half a raise later... (24k to 32k total) and ended up getting…

> I promptly left the company and found a much better job doing Dev for 55k, which sadly burnt some bridges with people i liked.

If those bridges are burnt because you left (or even joined a competitor) you are much, much better off. Employment is a transaction, your former employer chose not to pay you market rate.

Re: Ask HN: Hired to write, but mostly code, what to do?

#17

Post by rajacombinator » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 9:32 PM UTC

If they hired you as a writer (at a writer's rate) and instead got a competent programmer, they should be fairly happy with that and willing to give you a pay bump.