Ask HN: In what unexpected ways has writing a blog affected your career?
Oh boy, if you&#x27;re ready to read it... I&#x27;ll try to keep it brief, but it all seems to tie in. After graduating high school, knowing it all, working security for a few years, and going no where -- I asked for a raise and got a penny, which led me to go to college on company dime. In other words, I&#x27;d do my job, but now I fill the majority of my time up with school.<p>Off to college... wanting to make something more of myself, and as a former PC gamer-addict, and self-taught programmer, I wanted nothing to do with computers anymore. So I went opposite and studied psychology, really enjoyed it, and graduated with a degree in it. During my time there though, save for a year of taking off from work completely which was awesome, I became fascinated with why people go to work, why we do what we do, and how to make the workplace better, seeing and experiencing all that was wrong with it.<p>Graduated college... went to Israel for a year, teach English, and this company had a website they had &quot;been working on for 2 years&quot; and there was nothing there. At the time, I was just looking for something more to do other than teaching, so I volunteered to build their website and started learning more about web design and development and really enjoyed it. I could see myself doing this. My year is up.. come back home to student loans... apply to every job that requires a college degree. And I get nothing.<p>I remember as they charged my card coming back home on the plane, for an overweight bag, which took $65 from me, leaving me with $10 in my bank account. Meanwhile, it&#x27;s been a month and one of my payments is coming up... like $60 was due, so it wasn&#x27;t too bad. I had a week to get a job and get something into that bank account. I applied across the boards and came across a programming job, visual basic 6.0 fixing bugs and supporting an app that well.. VB6 has been a long-extinct beast, but I knew it from when I taught myself programming at 12. Long story short.... tyrant boss, but it taught me everything I knew and prepared me for programming in the &quot;real world&quot;. I eventually passed over a bribe for a lesser paying job, but that catapulted me into the field of web design and web development professionally.<p>And now I&#x27;ve caught you up. So where does my website, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;confessionsoftheprofessions.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;confessionsoftheprofessions.com</a> come into play? So I  studied some industrial-organizational psychology and social pscyhology course, more than just intro, and that&#x27;s where I wanted to go, but unfortunately, no one was hiring someone with a bachelors and like I said: $10 in my bank account with student loans due. I had to get back to work. And eventually just saw more ROI in the experience of work than going back for a college degree. I&#x27;ve been in the field over 10 years. I have looked at the salary I&#x27;d be making if I had went after the career I wanted and it would&#x27;ve yielded slightly less than what I&#x27;m making now -- which is nothing to brag about at all.  Keeps me paid enough but under the radar of not being the first person they look at when they need to start cutting salary. But also, considering the cost of college nowadays.. and the amount of credits I&#x27;d need for the program I&#x27;d want to take for the career I might have a chance to get into? Yeah.. absolutely no motivation. Knd of glad all this happened the way it did too. If I had been in that job sector, I would be out of work right now.<p>Confessions of the Professions was a blog that came to me one day a little over 7 years ago now when I walked into a bank and saw a teller, and for the first time in my life, I was working two jobs, making nearly a 6 digit figure a year, and sending everything full force at my student loans, paying them off in about 2 or 3 years. Of course, the IRS caught up with me, as I didn&#x27;t report the job so I could keep the cash and pay it off. To report both jobs would have taken too much from that I would have just been working for free for the government, who&#x27;d be taking my entire second paycheck. Eventually, they did.  But anyways, that&#x27;s for another topic.  I wondered what that teller of the bank saw: she sees what EVERYONE makes. She saw what I was making at the time, which was probably double or triple her paycheck. And they certainly are nicer to you when you have more of your money in their bank. So what does she get to see on the other side of the screen?<p>And so... the idea was born: I wanted to hear about what people were doing at work, what their lives were like, if they even liked their jobs. I would listen to my friends and family, take down all their stories, and that&#x27;s where A LOT of my first few hundred articles came from -- just listening and telling people&#x27;s stories. The site has since evolved into more than that, but it kept me connected to my psychology field. Of course, I couldn&#x27;t write all of these stories, so I opened up the blog and started soliciting for guest articles. And while I spent a pretty penny investing in articles in the beginning and making a lot of people on Fiverr very happy, I am happy to say I did that only the first year and never have needed to do it again. The website keeps me busy and there is only so much I can do since it&#x27;s technically a hobby site that I can only dedicate about an hour a day.<p>It also has other benefits: it has taught me about web design. It has taught me how to write better. It has taught me how to write for an audience that I could not see. The website got so popular in its heyday and was receiving around 100,000 visitors a month. Maybe not a lot to some of you, but I had never advertised the website--all organic traffic. Today, the website is still going strong, but has settled to around 30,000 to 40,000 visitors a month, though the quarantine has pushed that number up a bit more -- because what does my website focus on? A lot of things that are job and career related and have to do with making money.<p>Two of the biggest advantages that I hadn&#x27;t even foreseen was starting it with passion and without thinking about the money aspect. Not making it for money is was has kept it going. I would keep it going for free, though having help to pay the bill to keep it running does help. Eventually, I would figure out how to monetize it to an extent, and to this day, it has pulled in around $1,000 a year, on average. Again, not much by any of your standards, and not enough to quit my day job, but enough to let me know that people validate the idea of it by emailing me new and unique articles. I publish for free and make most of the money by charging people a rush fee on it, or to slap someone&#x27;s text ad on there every so often. Or some companies will pay you to publish articles, which has definitely helped cover costs of the server. But the ads I put on it do keep a little something coming in.<p>The other advantage was that before this website, I would have never thought I would be talking to people in India, Australia, South America, Phillipines, Canada, Brazil, Ireland, etc. While I can&#x27;t say I&#x27;ve &quot;benefitted&quot; from anything personally, it has been awesome to see my website validated by universities, big corporations, law firms, and more. While there are so many other places to publish... my fans do see it as a type of central hub of articles for the workplace. The website is definitely a place that many freelancers and beginner writers like to submit their articles, so that keeps everything fresh.<p>I have been publishing non-stop between one to three articles per day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Every week, I&#x27;ve got to go through about 10-20 emails and often get around 25-50 articles per month. I have written a lot of articles because my co-workers, my boss, and the job itself never stops providing me with things to write about. I write a lot about my experiences which are really never ending as long as I&#x27;m alive. I wrote about my interviewer&#x27;s weak handshake... and walking in really wanting the job, but walking out, not really caring anymore. That article actually went viral. Feel free to read it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;confessionsoftheprofessions.com&#x2F;power-of-the-handshake&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;confessionsoftheprofessions.com&#x2F;power-of-the-handsha...</a><p>The website helps me get out a lot of my own thoughts about my experiences in the corporate world, as a college graduate, who came from working dead-end jobs without a college degree to working dead-end jobs with a college degree, but &quot;dead-end&quot; in the corporate world, meaning I&#x27;m kept where I am at purposely, but -- it has never stopped me from making the salary I want. It keeps me connected to the web, keeps me connected to a huge part of what makes us human: going to work. The website continues to inspire me and many others who come across it. The times I&#x27;ve wanted to give up on it, just let it go, pay for it--but no longer post, well... the emails have never stopped since... technically day one.  So as long as people keep it going, they will keep me going.<p>As for how it has helped my career, well... I can&#x27;t say whether it has affected it directly or indirectly, but it definitely has influenced me in my career.