i am growing increasingly tired of people proclaiming to be things merely because they think it’s cool or because that’s what they want to be.
specifically i’m talking about people who proclaim to be writers and designers. the frustration comes because everyone with a pen thinks they are a writer and everyone with photoshop and frontpage is a designer of some sort, be it graphic or web.
yeah, not so much my friends.
do you know that there are actually people who went to school, paid real money, to learn how to do this line of work? do you realize that every cheeseball amatuer who claims themselves a professional at this sort of stuff discredits those people who really do that sort of stuff?
yeah, and that blows. really, it does.
it only happens with the arts though. you never here anyone proclaiming they’re a lawyer, despite never going to law school. a doctor without going to med school. but every schmuck that can string together a semi-coherent sentence or get their own little website is suddenly a writer and/or a designer.
does one have to be college educated to be a writer or designer? no, probably not. hell, there are tons of PUBLISHED writers and designers who’ve never been to college. but that’s the catch, someone has actually paid them to write and/or design.
this is my latest pet peeve. i am sick of everyone being a goddamn writer or a designer. this rant was inspired by some stuff that happened at work today. i work in an industry that inspires, gives tools to all these so-called designers. which is why it’s so frustrating. because i do work with real, actual designers. people who do amazing things with text and pictures. then i see some of the crap stuff put out there by self-proclaimed designers and it hurts my heart.
but i see it all the time, everywhere. especially in the world of blogging and online journals.
perhaps it’s my own self-conciousness leaking out. i don’t consider myself a writer. i want to be one when i grow up, but when people ask me what i do for a living i don’t say i’m a writer. sure, i get paid to write. but i don’t think that makes me a writer. i usually say i’m a copywriter, or that i work in marketing.
i guess there’s no nobility in striving to be something anymore. remember the good old days when people aspired? aspiring writer, aspiring actress, etc?
apparently it’s just easy enough to proclaim it and so it is done. i hope those people who call themselves writers, but who’ve never been published can sleep with themselves. because they’re a bunch of shitheads.
if i had a dime for every person who calls themselves a writer just because they can hold a fucking pen, or who calls themselves a designer because they can add a drop shadow to some text, damn i’d be a millionaire and i’d be saying it because it was true and not just because i wanted to be one.
“it only happens with the arts though. you never here anyone proclaiming they’re a lawyer, despite never going to law school. a doctor without out going to med school.”
i disagree. it is a rampant problem in my field of network engineering/administration. every hack in the world went out and got MCSE’s thinking that it would be easy money with a just a few clicks of a mouse. it’s taken a serious impact on the rest of us who’ve done this job for over 10 years with multiple cert’s in the industry. those of use who are the real deal, with a college degree, with the industry cert’s, with real world experience — not just paper certified “professionals” that paid for a 10 day boot camp.
-end rant-
Thanks. (I’m a designer.)
i’m an unemployed slob…and i can say that, cause it is true. rock on jodi.
I’ve been thinking almost exactly the same things. One of the scariest things I’ve heard recently is “I’m thinking of setting up a webdesign business but I guess I should learn to build tables first” *shudder*. Every school child and their dog can do HTML, it doesn’t make you some kind of web guru.
So thank you for writing what I’ve been thinking so much more clearly than I could 🙂
Equally annoying are the people who think they are progammers because they got a liberal arts degree and taught themselves a little HTML, and got a job as a “web developer” during the boom. Hey people: HTML is NOT A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE! You can’t compile it! You can’t run it! It’s a script that tells a REAL PROGRAM what to do! A fucking SCRIPTING LANGUAGE! Now all these so-called “web developers” flood the job market with their shitty little HTML “skills” and lend to the perception that web development is all about Flash and bullshit graphics. Grrr.
So it’s not computer related, but this phenomenon is majorly rampant in the theatre world. Anyone you meet at a party will tell you that they’re an actor, but when you ask them what they’ve been in, they’ll say, “Oh, I haven’t been in anything around here…so you wouldn’t have seen me…” Basically they don’t want to say that they’re the assistant manager at Starbucks and haven’t gone to an audition since they moved here four years ago.
Bitches.
It isn’t just design and writing. Pretty much everywhere in IT you run into it. IT and the .com boom is probably responsible for the designer part of your complaint as well.
I’ve seen sys admins who would regularly state “I don’t know anything about computers,” as well as developers who didn’t know what a variable or constant was.
It’s all very annoying, but I pretty much tend to ignore it unless people like that are going to reflect on my performance.
Yeah! Well, I’m a writer and a designer! I don’t need no stinkin’ degree or a paycheck to prove it! ha!
The reason I can’t say that I am a lawyer is that I never passed the bar exam. Same goes for doctors. Those are regulated trades. My wife is dealing with a similar situation with massage therapy. Since it is not regulated in Minnesota, anyone can claim to be a massage therapist, regardless of what they know or of their ability. If it was regulated by the State, only those that met the State criteria could call themselves massage therapists.
You can ignore my first paragraph, I just wanted to be contrary with you. 🙂
On the other hand, there are those of us who are designers and writers, and yet have no degrees or certifications to prove it. We just quietly go about doing our jobs every day and collecting our paychecks. Hey, I actually taught college-level courses in programming, Web design, and yes, writing. I don’t have a piece of paper that tells me I’m qualified to do that, but I have a few hundred students out in the workforce who are earning a living using the skills I taught them.
Call yourself whatever you want, folks. It’s the product of the skillset you carry in your head that’s going to be judged in the real world, not the paper that’s framed on your wall.
/rant
whoa. i’m sensing some bitterness over here.
for me, my level of annoyance with this depends upon how one chooses to define “writer.” look it up in the dictionary. most primary definitions are “one who writes professionally.” but also “a person who is able to write and has written something.”
i can technically fit both definitions but would never dream of classifying myself strictly as a writer. the date of my birth will get no mention by garrison keillor on “the writer’s almanac.”
there are people who try to impress by calling themselves writers. i don’t understand why this would discredit others who are experienced in the art.