Against Editors

A writer’s rant:

Here is the traditional career track for someone employed in journalism: first, you are a writer. If you hang on, and don’t wash out, and manage not to get laid off, and don’t alienate too many people, at some point you will be promoted to an editor position. It is really a two-step career journey, in the writing world. Writing, then editing. You don’t have to accept a promotion to an editing position of course. You don’t have to send your kids to college and pay a mortgage, necessarily. If you want to get regular promotions and raises, you will, for the most part, accept the fact that your path takes you away from writing and into editing, in some form. The number of pure writing positions that offer salaries as high as top editing positions is vanishingly small. Most well-paid writers are celebrities in the writing world. That is how few of them there are.

Here is the problem with this career path: writing and editing are two completely different skills. There are good writers who are terrible editors. (Indeed, some of the worst editors are good writers!) There are good editors who lack the creativity and antisocial personality disorders that would make them great writers. This is okay. This is natural. It is thoroughly unremarkable for an industry to have different positions that require different skill sets. The problem in the writing world is that, in order to move up, the writer must stop doing what he did well in the first place and transition into an editing job that he may or may not have any aptitude for.

Engineering has a similar problem, in that if you want to advance, you often have to go into management, even though a lot of good engineers are terrible managers.

4 thoughts on “Against Editors”

  1. Engineering has a similar problem, in that if you want to advance, you often have to go into management, even though a lot of good engineers are terrible managers.

    Amen. I’ve pointed this out to clients for over 15 years: if you want to hold onto your best engineers, you need to establish a technical career track. The current practices tend to push the best engineers out into the startup and/or consulting market, while leaving you with less-qualified engineers and, frankly, less qualified managers, hence the Dead Sea Effect.

  2. “……….while leaving you with less-qualified engineers and, frankly, less qualified managers,”

    And those less qualified managers drive away any remaining good engineers.

  3. This sort of thing happens in many of the professions. It certainly applies to teaching and scientific research, to name but two.

    It’s an inevitable consequence of the fact that the paper-shufflers are the ones who set rates of pay.

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