When I graduated college in 2023, I was told by English professors that I should pursue writing only if I couldn’t see myself doing anything else. You’ll be broke, eating canned tuna, and writing listicles for BuzzFeed, I was warned. Meanwhile, within hours of graduating, the computer science majors were hopping flights to San Francisco for jobs at Google, where they’d go on to make more than their parents.
In other words: Not too long ago, the most powerful language in the world was code. Good writing—human writing, that is—was thought to be a relic.
But now, the start-up world is proclaiming on X that “storytelling is about to become the most valuable skill in business,” and that they’ve “never seen this many tech companies trying to hire in-house writers.”
