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.
> 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.
I agree, I dislike the use of "exploit" in this context because it sounds like enthusiastic people are mindlessly accepting these poor paying jobs. I like to believe that they know exactly what they're getting into, why it pays less, and they are taking the job for other reasons such as the ones you've named: prestige and glamour.
I meant no offense by the use of the word—rather that I think game devs should be able to enjoy the prestige and good pay/working conditions ;) If anything it's a jab at the companies who make record profits and still don't compensate their employees fairly, not the workers who take those jobs.
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 vast majority of startup game studios go bankrupt within a couple years of founding and the vast majority of solo indie devs only release one game.
There is no international industry-wide wage-suppression conspiracy, the supply-demand equilibrium is simply at a lower wage level than non-games tech.
It can be "unfair" in an intuitive and specific case while still being the result of market forces (is it fair that I'm paying rent to my former landlord's son? he did nothing to earn it except inherit this building)
EDIT: I realize you were not claiming it was a conspiracy, I just wanted to correct a common perspective by industry outsiders that see a lot of success stories and think "how hard can it be?" - the world is big and the "many cases" you are seeing a tiny % of the whole, which are overwhelmingly unsuccessful.
Is it fair that you're paying rent to your former landlord's son? It is if the rate is fair. Being a landlord is actually a job and it can involve quite a bit of risk (property damage, housing market crashes, etc). It's not exactly rare for landlords to actually lose money. Maintenance costs, taxes, and that risk should be priced into your rent, plus a reasonable fee. If that fee is unreasonable, now you're in an unstable market state. There would have to be significant anticompetitive forces in the property market (onerous zoning, natural limitations) to keep it that way, otherwise you would want to move to a new landlord with a reasonable fee.
Whether or not private inheritance is fair is a completely separate debate. We could do away with private inheritance, and all these market forces would still work to keep prices fair.
Oh, absolutely the failing is actually of the city to get enough housing built as to create an efficient market. But my point wasn’t really about my landlord but that the fact that some executive at Ubisoft or Activision are paying themselves generously while paying employees worse than non-games tech isn’t an indication that the lower wages in the games industry are due to collusion, rather than supply/demand equilibria being different in different sub-industries.
> It can be "unfair" in an intuitive and specific case while still being the result of market forces (is it fair that I'm paying rent to my former landlord's son? he did nothing to earn it except inherit this building)
I think where it gets to be frustrating is fields where even the "dull" side of it is hollowed out. My original career plan was Japanese translation. I wasn't nursing any fantasies of doing literary translation or games or anything else fun but even then the pay sucked the few times I managed to get work and I decided computers seemed like a better option.
I've actually been planning a career shift in 5-10 years doing Japanese translation, so it's interesting to read your comment. I have no delusions about getting paid a lot or only working on creative stuff, but it's still something I'd like to do. From everything I've read there is a lot of demand for JP->EN translators, and you can make a living off of it, which is all I need. What's your thoughts on the industry nowadays? Have you thought about going back at some point?
I graduated in 2010, which was probably not the best time, and I had a hard time breaking in when many experienced people wanted jobs too. I also observed a couple trends that I think made it challenging:
1. Machine translation is not a replacement for a human translator... but it's good enough to muddle through for some people that they'd rather not pay. If not, a lot of times they'd rather pay someone to edit MT than for a scratch translation. I've never done this, but to hear others tell it, it's not that much less work but it pays worse.
2. Sites like Gengo and Fiverr have popped up ensuring you're competing with people who are desperate or not doing it as their main job. I did work for Gengo and a surprising amount of work from prestigious companies or requiring a lot of nuance (contract translations, for instance) came through on the basic tier. That was interesting to work on but if people are feeding that stuff into a service like that, it speaks to how little they value good translation work. Unfortunately there weren't enough jobs that this was even slightly consistent so it wasn't a great way to make money even at their low, gig-work rates.
I have zero interest in going back. If you're interested to hear more from people who are still doing it, this community seems to be somewhat active with real, working translators: https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/
> 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.
There are 2 sides to this coin. Jobs with too much interest are discounted, but jobs with not enough interest pay extra. I'd rather live in a society where this is the case than in one where market pressure is distorted to the point that important yet under-appealing roles cannot be filled.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having written erotica on the side while working a day job where I write technical content, I truthfully find it much more difficult to write erotica. :P Props to you for doing it skillfully enough to get paid!
I wish I knew whether I was actually better at erotica than other genres or people are just more likely to pay for erotica. I suspect it's the latter...
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
It's hard for me to pin it down, but after blogging for 10+ years and working on my second book now, I kind of just have a good feeling for what will work. The topic and my approach to it feels true and speaks to my experience.
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...
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 Condé-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).
I wouldn’t compare technical writing and fiction writing as painting a barn to painting a Van Gogh. It’s a bit hyperbolic. There’s masterfully written technical docs and terrible Sherlock Holmes erotica. I wouldn’t compare the Holmes Erotica to Van Gogh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> It’s pretty good at getting the grammar right. My guess is that it would be good at checking yours.
Writing something that fits the pattern of correct English is a very different thing for a tool to do than identifying and explaining what’s wrong with something with errors; ChatGPT by design is focused on the first, not the second.
OTOH, grammar checkers are a thing, and if you have sub-native (or even just not-particularly-formally-polished native) proficiency in a language, they are definitely quite useful (well, at least the better ones for English are), you don’t need AI for this.
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.
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.
Not many jobs still pay you for the work you did a month, a year, 10 years, or 25 years ago. Not many jobs pay you just to sit at home and make up stories either. Of course many people want a job like that.
But the actual day-to-day doing of it, well, that's quite another thing. And most of us just aren't cut out to be an Agatha Christie, Stephen King, or Isaac Asimov.
You see some of that in music and similar things as well. For every AC/DC or Guns N' Roses, there were a million garage bands who worked hard but were lucky to get a gig at a local dive bar or a family member's wedding. That never stopped people from wanting to do it though.
The point is it’s incredibly hard to get the the good work. It’s not bad, if you can survive the insane competition. Which most, by definition, cannot.
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.
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.
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.