11 Comments

Awesome! Glad for you, RC.

It sounds like a kind of job I might have been a good fit for, and if I ended up unemployed I might consider it. But... in the age of the LMM, not something I think I would switch for. Not trying to say what you outline here is currently within reach of chatGPT, though--just that it's a lot closer than I would have thought, and a lot of people might be trying to use it instead of you. Actually, you might end up with a good career of cleaning up people who come to you wondering why people don't respond to their auto-generated gibberish.

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So what's cooking? It's been a while ...

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Great news. Congrats RC!

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Congratulations! Whatever happened to the zombie clover?

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Congratulations on your new job! It sounds like really rare blend of using your skill set consistently with a company that has a practicable future.

Also, thanks for the job explanation. I particularly appreciate you saying how much of your job is managing expectations. I’m in a different situation as I do grant writing for a nonprofit, but that really put words to some of my recent frustrations. Now I see that that’s part of my gig, I can tackle it with a more realistic view, including communicating about expectations with the non-profit.

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Congratulations! Awesome to hear about where you're at now!

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Congratulations! Glad you landed on your feet

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Congratulations! Well, that took you a whole two weeks. In a recession no less!

The Chinese have a saying: "the first pot of gold." Google tells me it's the Chinese term for "initial profits" but I've never seen it used this way. The way I've seen it used is the first time something or someone makes serious money. So, for example, you got your first pot of gold when you got your last job. It's not that you weren't earning money before. But you started earning enough money to have a nice, upper middle class lifestyle.

This is definitely a phenomenon I've noticed but didn't have a good term for. I like the term because too many people think it works like a literal pot of gold. In that first it's unearned, secondly there's only going to be one in your life, and third that it's somewhat mystical. Like they found it at the end of a rainbow. But of course it's really none of these things. The reality is the American saying "the first million is the hardest." Likewise your first pot of gold is your hardest.

Life is not a constant upward trajectory. Even when you're on an upward trajectory overall it goes up and down. This can cause panic. Especially in people who've experienced some pretty low lows and are afraid of falling back. But getting your second professional job is easier than your first. And your third easier than that. At least outside of exceptional circumstances.

It's ultimately a matter of self-esteem. You need to internalize that you are a professional writer with skills sufficient to be worth that salary. Because you are. An underinflated sense of importance is less noticed but just as problematic as an overinflated one.

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founding

Congratulations! Really glad to hear it.

The example piece is really good, really well organized.

Small nit, from a 10 year professional programmer: programmers, even the best ones, do 20-30% programming, and 70-80% process/bureaucracy/broader engineering tasks. I'm ignoring company politics and stuff; that would make the number go further down.

(For instance, the standard daily workflow is like this: edit tasks on a board, turn on several systems, pull some code from a repository, run tests on it, check and edit some designs, *make a small or medium sized programming change*, test it, document it, get review for it, review other people in return, push it, shepherd it through an automated (haha) deployment process, change settings in the deployment process to reflect it, document the release, edit the tasks on the board). The biggest of those chunks was the programming, but it probably didn't go over 30% of the day)

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The second part is excellent and pretty much totally matches my experiences as a (often reluctant -- I prefer other forms of working with text) copywriter for small businesses.

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