IMO good tech writers are way undervalued in general, so I'm really happy to see that this position appears to be well-compensated. If I were an LWN subscriber, I'd also be happy to know that my subscription is contributing to that person's salary.
I still remember when Steve Klabnik moved on from Mozilla he mentioned in a blog post [1] that he'd recently discovered he was the lowest-paid member of his team. I was simultaneously flabbergasted, because I felt that Steve's contribution to the Rust project was so huge that it was hard to imagine what the Rust experience would have been without him — and entirely unsurprised, because it's so typical of organisations to undervalue writing work.
Writing is communication. In my experience, in any endeavour involving more than one person, communication is the single biggest factor in success or failure. So... you know what I'm getting at: pay your communication specialists well.
People use and adopt the new features going into the kernel because of lwn. This is the medium where sagas like eBPF and io_uring play out & are heard of, where folks get inspired to use these capabilities.
Open source in particular needs these bards, to sing these artificer's epics.
Should kernel devs start commenting some of the more write-only parts of the kernel all on their lonesome, the lovely documentation people at LWN would find themselves out of a job and enjoying a deserved retirement!
They also mention "equivalent experience" so I'd imagine that isn't a hard requirement.
Up to 140k as a technical writer sounds pretty amazing, although I imagine LWN is the "major leagues" of tech writing so this is probably a bit of an outlier in that field. I actually have an English degree and briefly considered tech writing as an option earlier in my career, but at the time it was far easier to find a career path in Sysadmin/Webmaster/Developer roles, and I've sadly never been able to use my writing skills professionally (outside of issues and emails, of course!)
I don't know for LWN, but in software engineering in general, especially the type of engineers who are deeply interested in the kernel, the sciences means something like a bachelor of science in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, physics, chemical engineering, or other degrees with a fair level of math.
"in such a case, salary and benefits will be dependent on what we are able to arrange in the specific location"
How generous, they understand there are countries out there where software development specialists are accustomed to higher compensation than in USA. Hence the language used.
but, any English expository writing program would allow you to focus on a particular industry if you wanted, just pick your electives, term paper topics, etc. and no doubt if you're clever you could get approval for joint work in another department.
I am just idly wondering as I imagine a gilded life of tech journalism (which will be a million miles from the reality of deadline driven millstone)
But good luck to them - LWN always has the clearest explanation of "this is what the mile long thread on the mailing list means"