Good points all around! For the record, if you (or someone on your team) can write great posts quickly solo, that's awesome and I'd never dissuade it. But a lot needs to go right for that to be possible. For an individual to pull it off, IMO you need to meet these criteria:
- You yourself are doing something technically interesting
- You know enough about the project and/or topic to write on behalf of your team members and company. (Because posts on company blogs are perceived to represent everyone.)
- You need to be a competent writer. Sub-skills matter, too: editing, proofreading, creating visuals, and more. This simply takes practice, especially if you expect to move fast.
- It helps if you're a native english speaker, which many engineers are not.
- If you're truly doing it all yourself, you need to know your way around whatever CMS your company uses. Most engineers don't.
- You need to know enough to anticipate the repercussions. Love them or hate them, this is what Legal/PR/Comms are for.
If all this is true, yes, an individual can write a great post in a single day.
To answer your question directly, I was able to write my main comment quickly because:
- I was responding to something. I wasn't writing from scratch. Hot takes are easy ;)
- I'm a cofounder. AKA: I'm comfortable writing on behalf of my company. It's actually part of my job.
- HN comments are lower stakes than a blog post. No long-term SEO impact, for example.
- I've been doing this for 10+ years. And my 500 word comment still took me 90 min to write and edit.
- Yup, I'm a native english speaker.
- Probably some other factors I'm blind to at this point.
- You yourself are doing something technically interesting
- You know enough about the project and/or topic to write on behalf of your team members and company. (Because posts on company blogs are perceived to represent everyone.)
- You need to be a competent writer. Sub-skills matter, too: editing, proofreading, creating visuals, and more. This simply takes practice, especially if you expect to move fast.
- It helps if you're a native english speaker, which many engineers are not.
- If you're truly doing it all yourself, you need to know your way around whatever CMS your company uses. Most engineers don't.
- You need to know enough to anticipate the repercussions. Love them or hate them, this is what Legal/PR/Comms are for.
If all this is true, yes, an individual can write a great post in a single day.
To answer your question directly, I was able to write my main comment quickly because:
- I was responding to something. I wasn't writing from scratch. Hot takes are easy ;)
- I'm a cofounder. AKA: I'm comfortable writing on behalf of my company. It's actually part of my job.
- HN comments are lower stakes than a blog post. No long-term SEO impact, for example.
- I've been doing this for 10+ years. And my 500 word comment still took me 90 min to write and edit.
- Yup, I'm a native english speaker.
- Probably some other factors I'm blind to at this point.