I was shocked to find out that Steve Klabnik is the lowest paid person on the Rust team because of how obviously high impact his work is, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering how non-programming non-management work is compensated in tech.

https://words.steveklabnik.com/thank-u-next 

The last time I looked for work, the best comp I found for a writing-related position was less than half what I could get for programming and it seems like mentioning that I was interested in writing hurt my chances for (some) programming jobs.

The CTO at a well known tech-y finance company told a friend of mine who referred me, "if this guy can actually code why would he want a writing job?" and then later told me to my face that he basically thought I couldn't program. Welp.

This post and Patrick's Twitter are examples of the value of writing

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1314245015174955008

If you look at what companies are willing to pay in recruiting fees to hire (~$25k new grad, >= $50k "staff"), Patrick's Twitter likely returns >= staff-level comp in recruiting value.

When I looked for work a couple of years ago, the only companies that really got this were ones that were young enough that the founders or an early hire who became an exec were still directly interested in and involved in engineering recruiting.

At older companies, some HMs would agree that writing is valuable, but they'd also say it's impossible to pay an engineer @ eng rates to help recruiting since the eng org couldn't have such a position and the recruiting org wouldn't want it since it wouldn't move their metrics.

If you're curious what metrics they focus on, "fraction of offers accepted" is common; incentivizes counter-productive behavior with little upside ("can't show you the offer letter until you commit").

Odd that objective setters wouldn't realize this, but that's another topic.