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, between 150 and 300 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.
Questions? Don’t hesitate to ask below. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your applications!
Nice, will apply shortly. Hope to get through this time.
The pay rate??
Variable, depending on how much you write and how often. If you’re interested, let’s talk! Write to the jobs@ address above.
Getting a statement of rates would be a milestone. Traditional magazine rates were openly stated. There were and probably still are books with that information for aspiring writers. Obviously, certain writers were paid more. But you want a significant effort making up a page mockup. Some indication it would lead to an attractive offer is needed, at least for old guys who aren’t chasing money or attention.
I’ve never applied because no one would ever state a rate. Failed transparency.
What’s the base rate for one article a week? Why won’t you state that here? Random article rate?
If you are asking what the pay is, you most likely are doing it for the wrong reasons. (former HAD writer speaking).
Yea i wrote in the early 2010’s so I can’t comment on what they do today but there was some money but it was more about the fun of doing it
Dailies (regular old blog posts) are short and sweet. If you write more than fifteen of them per month, we have a ~50% bonus.
Sometime in the mid-2010s, we’ve started doing the original content pieces where our writers really get to stretch their legs, and those pay better still.
But George probably has it right. If you’re really serious, and you want to make this a real part-time job, you absolutely can. If you just want to write some dailies when you find something interesting, we’re good with that too — as long as you can find a couple per week.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great oppertununity!
Mr. Crabs says asking for a fair compensation is a sure sign of a greedy employee.
I’m just glad he’s not charging me for all of this valuable experience he’s giving me.
The right reason to do any job is the pay. If you’re doing it for some other reason, you’re probably being taken advantage of.
True. For certain definitions of “job” and “pay”.
But it must be awful to have to live in such a transactional environment.
Sadly, many of us have mortgage-holders and food-suppliers who mandate that we live in such a transactional environment.
Hi there. This is an exciting opportunity! When do applications close?
We’ll start looking them over probably next week. (The real secret is that we’re always open for good writers anyway.)
Ah, a job one can do from Canada. 😉
Just remember: March 1st, a 25% tariff shall be applied to your works, so the articles will be automatically and randomly trimmed to the appropriate word count. It has yet to be decided by the White House whether this will be done at the word level, or letter level.
Given HaD is owned by Supplyframe who are owned by Siemens GMBH, it’s only US readers who’ll get the truncated articles.
RoTW will be just fine ;)
What is the age requirement, because I could get a permit.
Good question! I presume legal working age in the US.
I was just asking because some companies require you to be a certain age. Would hackaday hire a 15 year old?
Nobody can compete with Maya Posch, so what’s the hope.
Our writers have a broad range of backgrounds and interests: there’s probably room for yours too.
Hack a Day is hiring on my Birthday, That’s a sign.
Could you please have a page for all the submitted but not covered links?
Maybe grouped by submitted topic.
It’s just a shame that so many hacks are gone because it’s not worthy to write an article about it.
It could be like a community driven social media with 20links/day, showing the newest 1000 links, nothing fancy just a static html. With minimal curation, an no annotation.
Fun idea!
That would entail a real moderation job, though, because we get soooo much spam, and companies trying to get us to run their ads for them, and etc. You really don’t want to read all that. (We don’t either…)
The other question is when we put it into the “not individually written up” bin. Sometimes it takes a day or two before the right writer stumbles on the right tip.
And that brings me to “not worthy”. I really hate that idea. I know what you mean, but you also have to think about for whom it is worth reading, and we have a wide range of readers, with a wide range of interests. So if a post about thrust-vectoring on model rockets floats my boat, but not someone else’s…
It’s an awesome idea, though, especially if we could group them up by topic. Ages ago, Adam Fabio used to do a weekly roundup of related projects he found on hackaday.io. That was fun.
Thanks for the idea!
I’d see it as no-additional-work opportunity for the writers, in case they get too many good tips at one time, so they can write what they get to, and “dump” the rest there, perhaps recovering some tips later, when the good input is low (kind of a online tip buffer). If every interesting tip is covered, the uncovered list just stays empty.
There could be a second list for one-line-hacks, like “if you want to know if a plane is level, place a marble on it”.
Perhaps someone can presort the tips line into interest bins, or put (multiple) area-of-interest flags on the tips, so the writer has less reading to do to find tips on his area of interest — think ‘preapplying the article tags on the tips’. This may be an employment opportunity for someone with broad interest and narrow English language skills, but would require a tweak on the payment model.
Can I just sidetrack a bit here and say that I’m glad that Jenny List has hung around.
The, ..I bought it, so it’s mine to do with as I bloody well wish.. vibe in your wrtings is in strong my outlook also.