Comment by jeffparsons
3 years ago
IMO good tech writers are way undervalued in general, so I'm really happy to see that this position appears to be well-compensated. If I were an LWN subscriber, I'd also be happy to know that my subscription is contributing to that person's salary.
I still remember when Steve Klabnik moved on from Mozilla he mentioned in a blog post [1] that he'd recently discovered he was the lowest-paid member of his team. I was simultaneously flabbergasted, because I felt that Steve's contribution to the Rust project was so huge that it was hard to imagine what the Rust experience would have been without him — and entirely unsurprised, because it's so typical of organisations to undervalue writing work.
Writing is communication. In my experience, in any endeavour involving more than one person, communication is the single biggest factor in success or failure. So... you know what I'm getting at: pay your communication specialists well.
Writing is a force multiplier.
People use and adopt the new features going into the kernel because of lwn. This is the medium where sagas like eBPF and io_uring play out & are heard of, where folks get inspired to use these capabilities.
Open source in particular needs these bards, to sing these artificer's epics.