[f17]

I got burned by something like this.

I hired an editor (not on Upwork) who had worked for a number of very famous authors (people you've heard of, people who've sold millions of copies). They did a fantastic sample edit, and the quality of the work dropped off precipitously by about the 20% point of the manuscript. The best-case scenario is that they just didn't care, because I'm a nobody and because of the novel's length--over 250K words, so self-publishing is the only option. However, there's a lot of forensic evidence suggesting that they farmed the edit out to more than one person (which would explain the inconsistent apparent level of skill and care). So I started looking into this, and apparently this is a common practice. Being traditionally published won't necessarily help you; the big houses contract out most of their editing work, and the same thing can happen.

Software might have the opposite problem from fiction editing, though. With editing, the issue is that the money (at all stages) is so poor--the average novel only sells a couple thousand copies--that I imagine a lot of people feel they have to do this sort of thing to survive. In software, these problems tend to involve there being far too much money at stake.

[rout39574]

The term of art for this process from the MBA side is "Extracting the value from the brand". The editor developed the reputation for good work, which had some value. Now they're cashing in by selling the brand attached to poor work. The reputation is decaying at some rate, but slower than the editor is extracting money.

Notice, for example, you're not helping it decay, your story can't be tied to the bad actor. You have good reasons for this, but it's why the scam works.

The key correlate to understand from "Extracting value from the brand" is that when the process is complete, there is no value left in the brand. It's explicitly setting up a con, defecting from the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Lying with more words.

My favorite examples of this pattern are from other areas of endeavor: Kitchen Aid mixers, which used to be an industrial quality offshoot of Hobart and now is trash; and Singer, which used to be a superb sewing machine, and now is trash.

But you can see the pattern in many places.

[nathanaldensr]

I have a KitchenAid stand mixer and it's just fine. All the attachments work as expected and the motor runs smoothly after hundreds of uses.

[gumby]

> However, there's a lot of forensic evidence suggesting that they farmed the edit out to more than one person (which would explain the inconsistent apparent level of skill and care).

I'm sorry about your experience.

But you might be interested in knowing that that phenomenon goes way back -- a lot of the "old masters" paintings were done by apprentice artists working under some level of supervision from the "named" painters. And I'm talking about really famous painters like Rembrandt or Reubens.

Also quite a few of the most prolific contemporary mass market authors have "assistants.

[bombcar]

It's also literally the modus operandi of every consulting firm ever; bring in the A team to sell and seal the deal, and then farm it off to the lowest possible team they can find.

[listenallyall]

Moreso for enterprise software. Often the "farming off" is to developers in another, poorer, country.

[f17]

> Also quite a few of the most prolific contemporary mass market authors have "assistants".

I told my new editor what I paid to hire the big-name editor and she said, "You could've gotten a book [as in a ghostwriter] for that."

And yeah, I'm well aware of the authors who farm out their names. If you're writing formulaic commercial work, why not? I don't begrudge their existing; I just wish they didn't take up so much marketing and publicity oxygen (but, on the other hand, if the commercial hacks weren't using that up, it'd go to overconnected MFA "literary" hacks, so... no worse for it?)