[jseliger]

Grant writing is stressful and has an impact beyond just the meetings directly discussing the grant. I haven't had the pleasure of writing them myself, but I know several people who do.

Many people who are good at whatever activity the grant is supposed to support are terrible writers or at least terrible grant writers (which isn't surprising because grant writing can often be extraordinary boring).

From what I can gather, most scientists in the sense of working at universities as profs aren't selected for their ability as writers until they actually become profs, or at least post-docs. Which means that many will be something like 30 before they realize writing grants is important, but that they may not be well-suited to doing so, since few people are.

My family's consulting business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (you can read more about this at http://blog.seliger.com if you're curious), and many of our clients hire us precisely because they're not good at grant writing but are often good at providing whatever service they're providing. We mostly write human services grants but sometimes do technical work. I'm actually surprised that more profs don't find ways to outsource or partially outsource grant writing; they could do for in the neighborhood of $5 – $10K / proposal, which is relatively small relative to the value of their time.