| ▲ | rqtwteye 14 hours ago |
| I really wish tech writing would get more respect. I work in medical devices where we have to produce a ton of docs. Instead of hiring writers we burn a lot of engineers’ time writing docs. Their main job is to produce systems and writing is just a side annoyance to them The result is badly written, inconsistent documentation that’s close to useless besides fulfilling regulatory requirements. |
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| ▲ | chartpath 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| We should pivot the culture to one that is pro-liberal arts again. These people know how to read and write better than STEMs in general. CS as the only path to programming was always too narrow, and often people with a broader education are better at creative solutions. With AI-assisted programming I'd argue they have an even clearer advantage now. |
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| ▲ | fzeindl 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > These people know how to read and write better than STEMs in general That is completely untrue. Efficient, creative writing is a skill that can be learned by anyone by following a handful of rules. | | |
| ▲ | creesch 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In theory, it isn't that difficult, in practice writing _accessible_ text takes a lot of practice and feedback. Letting go of your own biases towards base levels (curse of knowledge) is something that already trips most people and what people find really difficult to overcome. Which is why the statement you are responding to is often more true than you might realize. Because these people have had a lot more practice in that specific area. Although not all of them, that would be a generalization in itself. | |
| ▲ | GarnetFloride 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I help run a writer's symposium, and let me tell you it's really hard to write a good novel. We get editors all the time talking about things they commonly see done badly in submissions. Slush pile readers (the people reading unsolicited submitted manuscripts) have so many war stories about awful writing. The books you see on the shelves are less than 1% of what's created and even then there are ones that get through that are bad. Now we have amazon inundated with AI generated books that are just incoherent. And that is creative writing that strives only to be entertaining. Tech writing tries to teach you how to do something, which is much harder. I like watching maker videos, and even the ones trying to explain how they are doing something always skip over important steps. |
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| ▲ | SketchySeaBeast 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have a liberal arts degree and I don't want to do technical writing. It's so much harder than dev work and it's utterly mind numbing. | |
| ▲ | 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | mp05 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’ve always noticed that truly excellent programmers with strong lexical instincts also tend to be formidable with their native language. Not necessarily verbose, but capable of clear and structured writing. I’d even go so far as to argue that if someone has poor writing skills in their native language, they’re probably not a very good programmer. |
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| ▲ | robertlagrant 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| From what I've heard from tech writers, it's a job that very few people want to do for a long time, or make a career of it. You get someone for a year or two at most, and then they move on to something more interesting, is the impression I have. |
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| ▲ | vanilla_nut 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A lot of companies pay and treat tech writers like shit. If you're a decent tech writer who can write well, grok engineer speak, collaborate well with engineers during crunch time before a release, and apply your technical knowledge to build and maintain documentation infrastructure... well, you'll get comped slightly beneath the level of a developer with similar experience. For folks like me who enjoy the writing side of things, it's worth it. But there are very few people who truly appreciate both the writing and the development side of the role. You honestly need both. Most companies pay poorly, and wind up hiring non-technical folks who can barely manage a CMS. Those people can be helpful in a larger org, but at the end of the day, most technical orgs need a truly technical writer who can talk with the engineers directly and mess around with the product pre-release. | |
| ▲ | datadrivenangel 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Great tech writers have the skills needed to actually do software development or project management, and often end up either moving into one of those or going to more creative writing endeavors. | | |
| ▲ | voidhorse 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This has been my experience as well. The best technical writers often know much about the domain they work in, and can do a fair portion of the work themselves (in software engineering, the best technical writers are the ones coding their own writing tooling) In fact, many fields actually require their technical writers to have some amount of education in the field (e.g. biology BAs minimum or such for medical technical writing). Unfortunately, this is a braid field in which other technical writers are performing really basic tasks, like writing straightforward gui instructions. I think this wide range gives the market an excuse to undervalue the discipline, while many writers doing important conceptual writing work are some of the most valuable participants in the arena. After all, nearly all of human epistemic and technological development has been conveyed through the medium of text. What are mathematicians if not amazing technical communicators? | |
| ▲ | rqtwteye 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I guess you need to hire engineers who also enjoy writing and are good at it. |
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| ▲ | ElevenLathe 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This would seem to be a sign that some changes are needed to make it into a career people actually want to do. Perhaps it's at simple as paying more, though probably other changes in workflow/working conditions/status (all correlated with pay) are what would really help the most. |
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| ▲ | haliskerbas 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| No one gets promoted for good documentation. It just has to be good enough for the promo panel to skim through and be impressed, lots of nice large percent results too. But not good enough for a system to be maintained, or an on-call to work on, or someone new to contribute to. |
