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I've been a lurker for quite some time. Never thought I'd have to write
but....
I am a technical writer with 4 years tech writing experience and 10 years
programming experience. I'm an American who recently moved to Holland for
this job writing hardware and software documentation. Before moving here
last week, I was a medical tech writer in Australia for three years.
The programmers are great, as well as the project managers. The consultant
technical writer, however, is another story.
The company hired a consultant who will be here until October, in his 50s,
from the UK and says he's been a technical writer for 20 years. he
interviewed me along with the engineering dept head.
He sent me an installation guide to review and even said he'd welcome my
comments. He spends most of the day explaining to me that he's FrameMaker
certified, although when I suggested that we may want to consider FrameMaker
for the larger documents (thinking that would make him happy) instead of
Word, he quickly pointed out reasons he had to keep using Word.
Well, I tried to be diplomatic but I really thought what he'd written was a
piece of crap. It's an installation guide without detailed steps, he had
all the steps listed in one very long sentence, followed by screen captures
without headings. The screen shots are not referenced anywhere in the text.
He also has cautions and warnings intermingled throughout the text. He
describes in another sentence after the screen shots what will happen if you
don't perform the action/task for EACH tasks. He never mentions the product
by name anywhere in the guide either.
We purchased RoboHELP a few days ago, which he has used to literally dump
the printed document into HTML-Help format. There is no difference between
the printed documentation and the HTML-Help file.
The company is happy with any documentation because before he came, they had
none. They'd settle for documentation on a roll of toilet paper (a quote
from marketing).
Although he copied basically the entire company when he sent me the
document, I went to him *personally* and said the document was a good
beginning but maybe in the future, we might want to consider explaining
procedures in an ordered format (as opposed to one long never-ending
sentence - didn't say that), referencing the screen shots, using
second-person throughout the document, consider that the help files should
vary a little from the manual.... He seemed fine with that and went outside
to have a smoke.
Well, fifteen minutes later, the engineering manager calls me into his
office to say that "Paul" was upset and didn't appreciate me commenting on
his work. The manager was laughing the entire time but suggested that I
speak to him and just leave him alone.
I go to my desk and he runs outside to have a smoke the second he sees me.
I waited but then had to go home.
I still have 3 weeks left on my probation period, he's here until October,
how would you suggest I deal with him? I guess I figured if he'd been doing
this for 20 years, things like a peer review wouldn't make him run and cry
to the boss but now I'm afraid to say anything for the next few weeks.
The larger problem is the documentation IS crap and, although the company is
happy because "it's better than nothing", after he leaves, I'm the one stuck
with actually improving it all.
I don't want to run like the wind (tech jobs here for native speakers are
a-plenty) because I've never spent less than two years on any job. Can
someone give me any ideas on how to appease him?
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