Which job is a lot better?Call center agent or Technical Writer?
Asked by Doraemi
The call center job pays handsome salary but it has high burnout since it is a highly stressful type of job. The technical writing job is paid well but not as high as that of the call center agent. But i am not sure if technical writer could be as highly stressful also as a call center job.If so, would it be wiser to take call center job?If i will choose technical writer,does it have great career opportunities?Overall, which job do you think is way lot better for a long term career if i get to be qualified to both?

Best Answer:
Be a technical writer if you can.

Technical writing generally should be a better long term situation than a call center agent. When I got into IT I was asked to be a technical writer very early on and it was extremely difficult because I didn't have the background and experience for it. My first task as a new employee was to go on assignment to another company and work as a contractor there and write technical articles evaluating the IT infrastructure of a few small companies. The company I was assigned to work in was Microsoft and the "small" companies included Weyerhaeuser and Boeing. Later on I began to write technical articles for one of the large IT magazines specialty technical publications and turned that into a second career. That turned into a monthly column and although I have phased out of that now I wrote monthly articles for many years and made a good part time job out of that. Now writing is not easy as there are obviously deadlines and research and rewrites and more deadlines. After you do it for a while you may be able to do editing of other people's articles and even books which I have been fortunate enough to do also. I struggled through and eventually got the hang of it. If this is your first IT opportunity I would go for the call center and work into the other down the road. If you are already good at writing (good English skills, grammar, etc.) then you could go for it and face the uphill battle for the first few years. I just don't see the field of system, planning and documentation going away anytime soon. If you like to write, I think there are going to be good opportunities out there.
Answered by Richard L