Full Stack Economics
Until then, my journalism career had been going well. I was one of five Washington Post writers who followed Ezra Klein to Vox Media to help start Vox.com in 2014. The next year, Vox gave me a positive performance evaluation and a 14 percent raise.
But in the fall of 2016, things started to go downhill. My editor started telling me I was too slow to cover important stories on my beat. In early 2017, after a management reshuffle, editors started asking me to change my beat altogether. Instead of writing about broad trends in technology and the economy, they wanted me to become a Silicon Valley beat reporter.
I didn’t like this idea, in part because I had no idea how to get Silicon Valley scoops from my desk in Washington DC. Amid escalating tensions, I reluctantly started looking for a new job. I wound up back at Ars Technica, the publication I’d worked for before I went to the Washington Post.
At the time, I wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. But in retrospect, I think an important factor was the birth of my first child in November 2015.
