Writing for fun
I often get asked why I am writing content on LinkedIn and in case you didn’t know, this is not my full time job 😅. I just hit 10k followers so I thought it would be a good opportunity to answer this question.
I initially started writing because I was interesting in hiring people in Amsterdam and LinkedIn showed me that I used to have close to zero reach in the Netherlands 😅.
With that being said, I have always enjoyed writing content (e.g. I used to run a tutorial for Photoshop website as a teenager). Writing about my personal experience growing as an engineer is:
- Not time consuming – I don’t really do research about statistics or what others say, I just write about my personal experience
- Easy – I don’t think about how to write about specific topics, I just write what’s on top of my mind
- Enlightening for me – writing is a form of self reflection so I’m confident that it helps me structure my thoughts better and become a better mentor/lead engineers around me
- Fun – I write short posts and sometimes I spend more time generating a fun and relevant illustration than I spend time writing the post
Besides that I have no plan for the foreseeable future to monetize this content, start a newsletter or sell a book – I’m copying my posts back to my blog mostly because LinkedIn is terrible at showing old posts. The rationale being that it would likely make the whole writing experience less fun and that financially speaking, whatever revenue I would generate from my posts would likely be negligible compared to my current compensation.
I also don’t know how long I’ll keep writing, but as long as I’m having fun, I’ll keep going.