On Wed, Mar 17, 2010, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Where to learn Linux?": > Are you willing to stick with something, no matter how stupid it > looks, how impossible it seems, etc because your customer/employer > demands it? > > It's very different than doing it for years as a hobby. > > I ask this question because at one time I was asked several times a > week (now down to once a month) about becoming a technical writer. > Many people write for fun, few can do it for a living.
This is something that can be asked about every profession, including programming (which according to some previous responders, appears to be the "holy grail" of professions?). Programming for fun is not the same as programming stupid things that your employer tells you to program, or debug other people's crappy code. I guess you're implying that the amount of creativity remaining after being told what to program is still higher than the amount of creativity in writing what you are told to write. This can be true if you pick the right place to work - but can be false in other situations. I know places where programmers are basically "drones" told exactly what, how and when they need to program, while other places where technical writers get a short written description and an hour discussion with the technical people, and then get a couple of weeks to sit and write as they please. If we get back to system administration, there are again a spectrum of places: There are places where system administration is "reactive" (people complain, and you fix something) and there are places where it is "proactive" (the system people are creative in installing new things before people ask for them). There's also a spectrum between giving service to hundreds of individual employees (e.g., installing stuff on individual Windows machines), and giving service to the whole organization (e.g., installing servers, building the network, etc.). The remaining issue that cannot be ignored is, of course, salary. If the salary for programmers is higher than for technical writers (and it is), and you are already good at both and like both, it is natural that you'll choose the one with the most money... -- Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Mar 17 2010, 2 Nisan 5770 n...@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Why do programmers mix up Christmas and http://nadav.harel.org.il |Halloween? Because DEC 25 = OCT 31 _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
