Hackaday has been expanding into all kinds of new areas. We find ourselves stretched a bit thin and it’s time to ask for help. Want to lend a hand while making some extra dough to plow back into your projects? These are work-from-home (or wherever you like) positions and we’re looking for awesome, motivated people to help guide Hackaday forward!
Contributors are hired as private contractors and paid for each post. You should have the technical expertise to understand the projects you write about, and a passion for the wide range of topics we feature. If you’re interested, please email our jobs line, and include:
- Details about your background (education, employment, etc.) that make you a valuable addition to the team
- Links to your blog/project posts/etc. which have been published on the Internet
- One example post written in the voice of Hackaday. Include a banner image, at least 150 words, the link to the project, and any in-links to related and relevant Hackaday features
What are you waiting for? Ladies and Gentlemen, start your applications!
Is there a quota for writers to have within a given amount of time? Basically, what is the commitment expected for the authors?
We’d like to see 2-3 articles per week from each contributor.
Who does the article graphics?
They have a guy who does nearly all of them, you’ll recognise his style. He’s been mentioned before in answer to the same question. Far as I remember, it’s Joe Kim. HAD’s “about” page, link at the top – http://hackaday.com/about/
“[S]ome extra” defined by what, exactly? A fixed hourly rate? Independent contractor based per article compensation? What incentive do authors have to maintain quality and not just fill space?
It’s usually best to read past the third sentence. In this case that’s definitely true as the first sentence of the second paragraph answers your question:
“Contributors are hired as private contractors and paid for each post.”
Paid how much per post? What is compensation based on? Work count? Article views? Controversy coefficient? Again, what incentives do authors who are paid on a per post basis have to maintain quality and not just fill space to get paid?
They get a bonus if they feature a project that uses PVC as a pressure vessel. I think there’s a bounty on projects that combine Arduino and RasPi as well.
And Fail-Of-The-Week articles about the death of a project urn a double payment bonus as well.
I like this idea – you should pay 1.5% extra for every, “Not a Hack!” the post gets :-)
Since no one’s replied…
(Disclaimer: 2 years ago info)
There was no measure of meritocracy. You were paid a flat rate per post, which was expected to be at least X number of words. If your articles were read by several multiples as many people as some other author? Same rate.
Because Hackaday needs 7 articles a day of content, you were given a significant bonus if you managed to regularly provide content. I think you had to hit X number per month, or X number per week for a month to get your bonus. It was a big enough bonus you’d be foolish not to write regularly (which helps editors not have to scramble and fill articles on top of their editing on top of their day jobs).
The weekly feature columns (Fail of the week, Retrotacular, etc) were new-ish back then and those were expected to be longer, and paid way better. Like way way better, 5x as much or something. Getting a column was something you’d work out with an editor if/when they felt you were ready.
The longer form articles were brand new then, dunno about those.
Incentives to write quality articles? None on their end (again, info is 2 years old), only pride in what you put your name on. Over the years readers can surely identify the authors that were just phoning it in or slamming through a quick couple hundred words without contributing any content beyond the link, and those that care about what they write. You can all probably name your top 3 writers right now that are a pleasure to read and 3 others who make interesting projects sound boring.
Editors back then were starting to fight pretty hard for Supplyframe to up the rates their writers were getting paid, most of the time they’ve got your back. Supplyframe also seemed to be a fairly hands-off and benevolent ownership, I know Mike’s mentioned in posts several times how proud he is of HAD’s editorial independence.
Do you accept applications from outside the US?
Yep.
Patience and a sense of humor required to deal with asshole commenters.
But proofreading and fact checking optional :-D
Rodney, I think Benchoff offers a course on just that to all new HAD writers. He’s got experience in that field.
When I wrote for HAD, I wasn’t kind to the trolls. Sometimes fed them, but other times pointing out that they’re just being mean, wasteful people and they represent 1% of the readership. Some people on staff have a “never say anything controvercial or confrontational” way of going about life, I didn’t. I got a fair amount of feedback from readers thanking me for it and saying that the comment sections on my articles were the only ones worth reading because they had a modicum of policing, even if there was no censorship. I got feedback the other way too. Each to his own.
You do absolutely have to be ready for a complete stranger to kick in your door, rub shit on your walls, punch your dog, and tell you to kill yourself. It will happen. Some HAD writers have it happen to them almost every day. If you let that get to you, I’d say being a HAD writer (or at least, checking the comment section on your own articles, something many writers don’t even bother with) is not for you.
Well at least you don’t have that “voting up/down” that some sites do. Quickly ruins a place.
No, allowing people to post anonymously and without any repercussions to the invariable shit-throwing quickly ruins a place. Case in point, the comments here. Tack on the bizarre trope of ‘but muh free speech’ and you have the most entitled and toxic community on the Internet. Case in point, the comments here.
You are all terrible. I could tolerate it if half of you were funny or a quarter of you were insightful, but you’re not. It’s a constant stream of shit.
The upvote/downvote thing quickly turns a place into a banal meme economy with people competing against each other for imaginary internet points. Guess which one I’d rather have?
Evidence, for the inevitable reply to this comment:
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Dude, this isn’t NEAR the most entitled and toxic community. The average age here sees to that. You want to look where some of this generation’s idiot teenagers hang out.
Meepsheep’s Law is entirely to blame for things like “Natsoc” teenagers, and the “alt-right”. Unbearable mixture of spoiled, arsehole, and stupid.
I’ve got to say, in all my extensive internet use, HAD’s is one of the most value-added comment communities I regularly come into contact with. I actually click through from my RSS feed to read them. Often!
“You are all terrible.” – not by a long shot. Besides, we provide you with (some) income. So… Besides that, I believe that you know this, and just deliberately play this card. Maskirovka. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception)
Well, I like it here. I’ve learned a lot and most people are nice even when I ask relatively stupid questions.
Just don’t say anything mean about the 3.5mm audio jack. If you do someone who still wants SCSI and Parallel ports on their Macbook Air will call you names and question your profession, career, and parentage. Haha.
Hey, I’m half funny and a quarter insightful. :-p
@ Gerrit Coetzee: I miss SCSI… All those pins made it feel REAL, like you could see where the signals were going. Firewire and USB and Thunderbolt and Lightning and all those other high-speed, low-pin-count serial connections just feel like some sort of fragile, mystical hand-waving that is going to desync and fail at any moment.
(I know about SCSI termination nightmares. You don’t need to mention that.)
I don’t think it’s just the anonymity. It’s the distance.
Plenty of sites require sign in via social media to comment and there’s still abusive comments facebook profile pictures and all. Short of heavy moderation IDK how to fix people being mean at a distance.
Clearly you have never read the Yahoo answers or popular Youtube video comments then. This community is centered around doing things differently and taking novel approaches to things. It requires a certain degree of openness, thinking outside the box and there is probably a bit of logic and general “get to the point, don’t coddle people’s emotions” involved as well but that doesn’t mean the community is automatically or inherently toxic as a result.
Asking for transparency in the “hiring” (pay per article) process in an article asking for people to sign up to participate in that process is not being toxic, it’s being transparent. Requesting authors of articles to not snarkily disregard basic safety concerns about things like PVC pipe being used as an air pressure storage medium is not being a bad community. It is the community pushing back and saying no, the author is not being a reasonable person here and that you should consider this other opinion and data as well, particularly because this is a well known, legitimate safety issue that this site seems to either disregard or make fun of for presumably monetary gain reasons. Controversy = more clicks, right?
Some posters are a bit more to the point but when you are quickly iterating through possibilities or solutions with another deeply technical person, stopping to ask how their day was or requesting more information on how they are feeling isn’t really relevant to the mutual goal of furthering design discussions and fostering the sharing of information about a highly nuanced or technical topic.
I don’t think this community would function well if it was dripping with people who were constantly refusing to share their dissenting opinion or ideas simply because it might offend the status quo or the author or who were taking great pains to coddle everybody and not come across as offensive to anybody ever. The readership is a very wide swath of people with vastly different talents, interests, experiences and abilities anyway. I also don’t get the impression that people are being utter assholes about things either, despite your opinion that the comment section is somehow the lowest dredges of the Internet.
Plus, at the end of the day, these comments as a whole represent real people who are giving up their time, experience, insights and ideas for literally nothing in return but are generally trying to help the community at large by sharing their thoughts and sometimes opinions with others. Are you really arguing that the comments section is largely devoid of anything useful or insightful at all? I don’t think that is the case at all.
Dude, it’s just a website. Nobody’s punching anybody’s dog. If you can’t take a few comments you don’t like, you’re probably not cut out for a job where the public are allowed to respond to your work.
And “trolling” is not “somebody posted something I don’t like”.
Mike – are writers assigned topics by Hackaday or are they in charge of finding their own material to write about?
I too am interested in the answer to this question.
When I wrote for Hackaday 2-ish years ago, my favorite part was the community that sends in suggestions of all their favorite hacks. The community curates all this awesome content from places beyond my usual sources and I get to cherrypick from this list. Things I’d never be in the loop about, like, some guy at your school’s blog with 5 readers but a really well documented project you wanted to let us know about.
I’m a bit of a blabbermouth, so writing wasn’t trouble for me, finding interesting things to be passionate about and share with others was the hard part. I always wanted to share the best things I could with my readers and have my topics be worth reading, not just filler. The tips line was my lifeblood, and I frequently said, you could fire and replace every single writer at Hackaday (myself, editors, everyone, the ol’ Heathkit treatment) overnight and (unlike with Heathkit) hardly anyone would notice. The tips line is where all the value in the company is. Writers get access to the tips line and can call dibs on stories or leave comments to other writers that it’s probably their kind of thing.
I wrote about one article per day, and I was asked to try to source my own content (not create, just source) about once a week if I could from outside the tips line. I did a poor job of that, the tips line was such gold.
Around the time I joined, Hackaday.io was created and we were encouraged to draw attention to it and promote it by choosing projects from there to write about as well. I felt bad for anyone who contributed there though, it was so damned hard to view the damned content in a way that makes sense for anyone who wants to read about your project. (This is probably less the case now, but I haven’t checked back). There were occasional projects I wanted to write about but, in good faith couldn’t link people to .io page it was such crap at the structural level. It obviously caused friction between me and other staff to hate the new baby. :p
Wow, https://hackaday.com/2015/01/13/cheap-diy-microscope-sees-individual-atoms/ was one of my favorite ‘hacks’ back then. They gave you grief for too many zeros, lol.
Great article, come back. :)
That’s what I’m talking about though, my article is meh. The content it covered is mind-blowing. An 8 year old could write about how awesome Mr. Berard’s project was because that’s what great projects do. They provide you with interesting things to say.
As to my return, I stopped writing for a temporary reason to do with something unethical (not that serious, but serious to me) that occurred. There was an unfixable part of the issue, and a fixable part of it. Rather than fix the fixable part as promised, I was asked to just keep writing. I said I’d wait until it was fixed. Maybe there was poor communication, but it went unfixed, I added no more articles to the queue, and was eventually let go for not writing (and to be fair, probably also for being disagreeable and overly critical, and my sense of humor not lining up well with some people’s who worked a lot harder with a lot more responsibility on staff than I did). I was kind of stubborn about it, but I think ethics is a place it’s okay to be stubborn on, especially when the consequences of that stubbornness are small.
I started writing similar content elsewhere for 3x as much the next day, but it would take like, 2 weeks for the content to hit the blog and the headlines slapped onto my articles were sometimes cringy and clickbaity, and it took something like 8 months to get paid. I kept looking for content (no tips line, so, had to do it all myself) that would still be interested or relevant 2 weeks after I wrote it but, basically never found any that I was happy to share. I figured, what’s the point when, even if I scooped everyone by a week, all the readers would have heard it elsewhere a week before it got posted. No surprise, there’d hardly ever be any discussion on the articles despite much higher readership.
Writing wasn’t a career, just a hobby that funded my tinkering. I don’t write for hire anymore.
At the bottom of this thread I talk about some of the best things about writing for Hackaday, I meant them. Little things that add up to a really nice experience for a novice.
I misunderstood at first as I read your posts. For a moment I thought that you were saying that HaD was getting recommendations on what kinds of hacks people would like to see, not specific project writeups. I thought you meant project idea suggestions.
That could be awesome… How about some sort of project idea voting system. Readers could submit project ideas, vote on them and browse them. I’m not saying HaD employees would have to do the projects that people vote for. Projects with more votes would just show up at the top of the pile. This would give HaD readers a source of project ideas that other HaD readers want to see.
Need a project idea? Go browse the suggestions. Want to make something that HaD is sure to want ot write up? Pick one of the suggestions with lots of votes.
I agree with you, content on Hackaday IO is very hard to read for me.
Agree 100% with you. I have given up on hackaday.io. If it links there I just don’t follow as I never found that I could make sense of anything. For a good model on how do do things: instructables does a much better job.
I can’t stand instructables! All those ads…
@notarealemail: Get an Instructables Pro account. There are lots of other advantages in addition to getting rid of the ads.
@Daniel Gray: Agreed. Much as I love HaD (and I do so dearly, cranky commenters notwithstanding), hackaday.io is an unreadable mess and way too annoying to bother dealing with. There needs to be a major site redesign.
I think half the articles here come from Instructables anyway.
Not as bad as Certain Other Websites, where almost everything is lifted from Reddit and reformatted as a listicle. I even saw a site the other day that’d lifted an article wholesale from Cracked.
The existence of those godawful journo-bots, that can take a few facts off Google and reformat them as factoids in the form of “articles” doesn’t bode well for journalism. The future is Basically-A-Google-Search with a header and some GIFs, also from Google Image Search. Actual human journalists will be left photocopying each other’s zines.
Sad thing is, for most newspapers, nobody will notice the difference, or care.
Homer:”Mmmmm, dough”
For prospective writers…
The 2nd best part of writing for Hackaday is how independent you are. You pick what you want to write about, you write it, you usually have the freedom to write your own headlines in an honest manner, 90% of the time the editors don’t touch a word other than typos, and it is usually posted the same day. That’s pretty unheard of elsewhere. You get to jump in to the deep end and do a lot of the stuff that an editor would normally decide for you. It’s almost all the freedom of writing for your own blog, only you have the momentum of the community behind you, they feed you their project logs and tips, and you have the support of the other staff if you need them.
For anyone who is passionate about electronics-ish stuff that Hackaday covers and without any writing experience, it’s a great foot in the door. There have been a few writers who mentioned that they regretted passing up the first hiring call they heard here because of how much fun they had later.
How much is the pay per article approved?
+1 internet
Rodney, be careful. You are watched by the goa’uld.
I could not reply to one of your earliest comments to this post. Hackaday.io sucks indeed, bu there are people who do all their best to make their hackaday.io project interface look as comfortable as possible. Click on my nickname and check my project page to see for yourself. And I’m not the only one knowing about the problem. I took this model from other people who realized that before I did.
By the way, I miss SCSI too. That’s why I have some open reel to reel SCSI mainframe tape drives.
Brian Benchoff can’t delete your comment. Priceless I’d say.
^^^
Are one-off articles accepted? Occasionally I come across an unknown gem that strikes up enough passion that I could easily extrapolate 150 words in HaD fashion to spawn interest from others, but I have a day job that allows me to live within my mediocre means, so I don’t have a desire to commit to 2-3 a week.
Likely not. But, for that kind of thing, why not run your own blog on blogspot or WordPress, or even your own hosted site? I do that and it’s a lot of fun for when I’m in the mood to write write write.
Just by observation, “Celebrity” (my term) authors have occasionally posted content as one-offs. Like, the people who would have hackaday articles written about them, have sometimes just written the articles right on Hackaday. Charles Lohr for example has 1 or 2 I’ve read but he’s certainly not slamming them out three-a-week.
A suggestion to HaD if I may…and I am regardless so…yeah.
Tested, Make, Element14 and…okay, well, those…have projects created by said Tested, Make etc contributors in sort of a weekly articulation (that is a broad term for article). My suggestion is; now that you are in possession of SupplyFrame Design Lab as a robust resource, developing an in-house HackADay branded guy and/or girl who hacks/makes/teaches/demos each week (or possibly more) giving certainly a more entertainment and interactivity to HaD. It would certainly give HaD slightly more identity than merely the HackADay Prize, which is very segmented in time.
This concludes my suggestion, thank you for your time and or consideration. Now may I direct your attention to the left side of the air craft where — *slips out of room with out having passed gas*
you need Charles Gant
sorry, that would be Charles Gantt
Wow. The great purge of HaD has begun. Lots of deleted comments here…
No, just yours.
If I have interest, and technical experience (10 years electromechanical and medical device engineering), but lack example project blog posts, am I out of the running? I would still reference my publically available journal article and create a Hackaday style example post in my submission