We’re Hiring: Come Join Us!

You wake up in the morning, and check Hackaday over breakfast. Then it’s off to work or school, where you’ve already had to explain the Jolly Wrencher to your shoulder-surfing colleagues. And then to a hackspace or back to your home lab, stopping by the skull-and-cross-wrenches while commuting, naturally. You don’t bleed red, but rather #F3BF10. It’s time we talked.

The Hackaday writing crew goes to great lengths to cover all that is interesting to engineers and enthusiasts. 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? We’re looking for contributors to write a few articles per week and keep the Hackaday flame burning.

Contributors are hired as private contractors and paid for each article. You should have the technical expertise to understand the projects you write about, and a passion for the wide range of topics we feature. You’ll have access to the Hackaday Tips Line, and we count on your judgement to help us find the juicy nuggets that you’d want to share with your hacker friends.

If you’re interested, please email our jobs line (jobs at hackaday dot com) and include:

  • One example article 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. We need to know that you can write.
  • Details about your background (education, employment, interests) that make you a valuable addition to the team. What do you like, and what do you do?
  • Links to your blog/project posts/etc. that have been published on the Internet, if any.

What are you waiting for? Ladies and Gentlemen, start your applications!

54 thoughts on “We’re Hiring: Come Join Us!

      1. I agree, English is not my first language but I’m still a hw hacker, many times I need to open a dictionary in the background. I value a short summary, but I don’t want to use up my morning energy to interpret it.
        Thanks for your work though! Best site on the web!

          1. That would be an issue if they used the candidates’ work without paying them, but I have absolutely no expectation that’s something Hackaday would ever do… You must be new around here if you think that’s on the table…

          2. And that is precise why I answered your question with my own thoughts on the matter.

            Also, *please* explain to me how what I said was an Ad Hominem fallacy, I have zero idea where you are getting that from, are you sure you read the comment correctly? Or are you maybe answering another comment than mine? This is pretty confusing.

            « You must be new around here if you think that’s on the table… » is just telling you it’s my opinion that if you were more familiar with Hackaday’s history I believe you would be less likely to suspect them of this. How is that in any way an Ad Hominem? Please please explain.

    1. To each their own. And on each topic, it’s own treatment. For some articles, sure, hackaday is just my link aggregator. For others, some context and a summary is all I cared for. Point is, hackaday has its niche. If you could do better, please provide a link to your content!

    1. The idea isn’t to attract professional writers, it’s to get people onboard who actually are interested in the content and ideally are from the community already.

      If they just wanted freelance writers, you could hire them from Fiverr or something.

  1. I appreciate it’s complicated, negotiable, and varies for innumerable reasons, but could you please include some notion of what the pay structure looks like?

    Last time I looked into a writing position (similar, but not Hackaday) after weeks of back and forth, it turned out that I couldn’t buy a cup of coffee for the pay from a single article.

    1. When I worked for them years ago, it was decent, not going to pay off my house and buy a Bugatti, but decent. Of course since its based on per post it’s dependent upon you, if you only hit the minimum quota well expect the minimum pay

    2. They NEVER will tell you in public hiring(*) announcement. They wish to pay less then possible. To not pay at all, the better. You pay to write for them, the best. But to do a better leverage to whom “fall in the net”, they do separate bargain for each of the candidate. DIVIDE ET IMPERA: do you know this Latin sentence?

      (*) hiring is a fool, because all writeres are freelances, not employee

      1. “They wish to pay less then possible.”

        Is there any job where this isn’t true? It’s like you all expect to get a job, and be made for life. Anyway if one wants more, they have to prove they’re worth more.

          1. It used to be common because one learned *one* trade, and stuck with it for their entire/short lifetime.

            It being common doesn’t make it a right.

            Modern people have more skills, tend to need to acquire new skills with each new job, and tend to go from job to job more often. Doesn’t make it *necessarily* a bad thing… Right?

    3. That was going to be my third question, right after:

      * is this intended to be a full or part time gig?
      * how many articles a month/week/day are you expecting?

      Depending on what you are looking for, and offering, you might get a bunch of people who “will code for cotton”, and one or two that will crank out the articles.

  2. 150 words. For most articles it is all the forced BS used to dilute a link to a poorly explained video.

    Luckily some articles have some substance, so I check everyday and enjoy these. For the other articles, please spare money and just publish the relevant link instead !

  3. I think you need to figure out what people actually want to read and why. No sense in hiring someone for the sake of hiring someone unless you want to hire the homeless.

    If the site doesn’t help me find a project or teach me something, its of no commercial value to me.

    1. This site is clearly of value to many people. Most makers I know love HaD, it’s a big part of the maker culture. If it’s of no value to you, then why even bother telling us it’s not… what are you doing here?

  4. I wish I could have the knowledge I have on Open-Source CNC stuff, but not the obvious conflict of interest of running the Smoothieware project.

    I would *definitely* apply if I didn’t have this issue, and I believe I’d have non-zero odds of seducing the Hackaday editorial folk.

    Maybe I should create an alias and just not disclose who I actually am :) ( pretty sure somebody would notice, Hackaday readers tend to be pretty sharp rain-man types ).

    My English’s not perfect either, maybe this wouldn’t be such a great idea all things considered.

    1. I don’t see a problem with the conflict of interest you describe. First, disclose the conflict when it might matter. Second, perhaps let one of the other writers take the stories that you don’t feel you can cover fairly.

      1. It’s not so much that I see the conflict as a problem, it’s more that I know from frequent and painful experience for sure others will have a problem with it, and it’ll take any fun out of the whole thing for me.

    2. Running a popular open-source hardware project is _not_ a conflict of interest. The opposite, it’s awesome.

      You can’t write about Smoothie and pretend it’s not yours, or use Hackaday resources to promote it. But you’d certainly be speaking from a place of authority on CNC topics with that background, no?

      Most of our contributors have cool side projects. Conflicts of interest get tricky when the other job is writing for another outlet or promotional in nature.

      1. If I only ran the Smoothie project that’d probably be fine yeah. But I also sell Smoothieboards, and Smoothieboard-powered laser cutters, CNC mills, CNC routers, giant 3D printers, lots of stuff.

        I personally probably would be ethically ok with disclosing my interest and writing interesting stuff with that out o f the way.

        The issue is I know for sure some people would create drama anyway. They’d shout about how it’s unacceptable, not honest, etc, even after it’s been explained to them why it’s fine.

        And I’m not well equipped to handle drama. I’ve lost hundreds of hours of my life just fighting somebody online for being unfair to the Smoothie project, often maliciously. I’m avoiding that as much as I can now, it’s better for my mental health and for my productivity. it’s a bit sad if there was some hackaday-helping in the cards for me, and that’s not going to happen now, but I can live with that, i’ll do other cool stuff instead :)

        By the way, the support is super very much appreciated, most folks are actually nice and appreciative and reasonable like you.

        1. Why not ask them if you can write these articles? Maybe they will say it is OK. If they start a tun of drama over just asking then I would suggest starting to shop around for something different.

          1. Hackaday isn’t the problem here, they are reasonable people, I’m sure there’d be some common ground we could find if they were actually interested in my dumb stories :)

            It’s not them that would create drama, it’s random mean people around the community, that get offended/upset/revolted by even the tiniest things, and that I have tried to deal with in the past, and that I can’t deal with anymore.

            The other day in the reprap freenode irc channel, somebody argued I couldn’t talk about 3D printing there *at all* because I sell Smootheboards, and anything I say is tainted.

            It’s extremely stupid, but I just don’t have the energy to deal with this sort of stuff anymore, so I’d rather do stuff that involves few people.

      2. running an open-source project might or might not be a conflict of interest. It really all depends on what you do for your living, what you do for your job, and what the company you work for do. If there is a conflict of interest between your outside interests and theirs, then it is likely to be a problem. That said, you can negotiate all these things before hand. It took me a couple of months to negotiate this in my current job, but I have it in writing that I can continue my outside interests as long as it has nothing to do with what I do at work. That is easy…

  5. Thanks Mike. A bit of pocket money for writing about something I’m passionate about sounds nice. Maybe when Covid subsides and things get back to business as usual I’ll give you a hollar.

  6. I understand why you wouldn’t want to mention the pay scale, but what I would like to know is how much work you expect. Is there a minimum number of articles per month? An expected median value? Most job postings I’ve seen give some idea of the amount of time or work involved.

    1. We love folks who write three blog posts per week, at roughly 45 min per post. Maybe add some more time if you get stuck reading deeper and deeper into a given hack. (Me. Just can’t stop sometimes.)

      Some of our writers do a lot more, some less. It’s negotiable, but that’s a good target.

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