11/10/2023
'Affordable' writers can be a false economy
The technical writing profession has always been dealing with employers’ misconceptions about what a writer can do, should do, and for what price. Some of these misconceptions can be blamed on how technical writers market their services, but one of the worst sources of conflict is completely a result of the market itself. Especially the role that third-party recruiters play.
The sad fact is that nearly all recruiting firms compete with one another only on price. As a result, there is automatically a huge constraint on the caliber of writers that these firms can afford to represent. It’s also the reason that you find the word “affordable” showing up so often in their marketing. When you contact one of these firms, they will send you as many candidates as you like, but it’s almost certain that every one of them will be either relatively inexperienced, not technical, or both.
To be fair, there are many documentation projects where this type of writer is still a good fit. If your company is working to update a large project, with an established client whose requirements rarely change, and your own workflow is very well defined, writers like these are important for the ‘grunt work’ that moves your documentation out the door on time. In many cases, the experience is more important to these writers than the pay rate is.
However, for most other types of documentation projects, assigning writers like these to those projects simply doesn’t work. They lack the project management, planning, and collaboration experience to produce a quality result. At best, shipping this documentation will hurt your company’s image, and at worst, it can open you up to lawsuits. That’s the false economy.
The bottom line is that high quality writing doesn’t come cheap. Even the best writers living in less expensive offshore countries will charge as much as those at home, because the supply is never that plentiful - and they know it. Many technical writers don’t even try to stay in the profession up to that level. They switch to management positions in engineering or marketing instead.
You probably have heard of the manufacturing triangle, with its three elements of high quality, rapid delivery, and cost: you’re allowed to choose only two of these. Documentation projects are no different. It’s always important to keep this in mind for any new project, whether you hope to do it only with your existing staff or whether you outsource.
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