Re: Contractors of Questionable Ability

[Beth Agnew <bagnew -at- INSYSTEMS -dot- COM>]

This is something that has always, and no doubt will always, plague our
profession. People with tool knowledge are being confused with people who
have skill knowledge. That is, anyone who can use a DTP product, or an HTML
editor, can get work producing newsletters or web pages without knowing
anything about information design or how to adapt content to the medium.
I've seen it in the desktop publishing industry, the multimedia industry,
and now the Internet services industry.

What's worse, is that these tool-only people work for less than what a
competent communicator should be paid. This devalues the rest of us. It
convinces our potential clients that we're too expensive (even though we
save them money in the long run). The shoddy work is then blamed on the
profession, not the idiot who hired the wrong person in the first place. On
the other end of the scale, we see so-called Web gurus charging insane sums
for putting a few bells and whistles on a web page. It looks exciting, but
there's no real content.

The only thing we can do is keep trying to educate the purchasers of our
services as to what constitutes good information design and development.

Beth Agnew
Senior Technical Writer, InSystems Technologies Inc.
65 Allstate Parkway, Suite 100  Tel: (905) 513-1400 ext. 280
Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 9X1        Fax: (905) 513-1419
mailto:bagnew -at- insystems -dot- com    Visit us at: http://www.insystems.com

See my friendly face at:
 http://www.bayside.net/users/cbsites/techwr-l/a.htm#agnewb