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# Know how they're paying your bills
- URL: https://www.gabestein.com/ltm4o5y1/
- Published: 2021-07-16T19:13:10.000Z
- Updated: 2025-06-24T22:46:35.000Z
- Description: A very Friday response to a very bad Medium marketing tweet.
- Author: Gabriel Stein
- Tags: Links & Sundry, media, Blog, money, #Import 2025-06-24 22:46

Writing can be an incredibly stressful experience in the best of environments. If you’re a professional, the activity is often made infinitely more difficult by the financial instability that [plagues the industry](https://theconversation.com/journalism-jobs-are-precarious-financially-insecure-and-require-family-support-157012?ref=gabestein.com), particularly in journalism, because it’s hard to be creative when your [basic needs](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/smarter-living/tips-to-stop-procrastinating.html?ref=gabestein.com) aren’t met. Given the horrific tales of continual abuse, pay-cuts, layoffs, and general misery my friends in the industry tell me, I’m frankly awestruck they manage to produce anything at all.

So when the leading platform for [destroying writing careers](https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22349175/medium-layoffs-union-evan-williams-blogger-twitter-subscription?ref=gabestein.com) [tweets](https://twitter.com/Medium/status/1416080186639065089?ref=gabestein.com) glib shit like this:

…I’m inclined to answer in kind. Maybe the best advice is to know how your employer pays you. If they’re funded mostly by VCs, with an opaque algorithm-driven payment model and a hand-wavy-at-best monetization plan, it’s [probably a scam](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/writing-mediums-partner-program-payment-scam-david-b-grinberg/?ref=gabestein.com). If you’re conscious of that fact, maybe you won’t be caught entirely off-guard when the next pivot comes, and thus better able to compartmentalize your existential dread and put words on the page. Or at least that’s how I assume pro writers do it, because honestly, I don’t know any other way I could.