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In article 6080905 -at- axionet -dot- com, bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com (Bruce Byfield) writes:
>
>It occurs to me that those who believe that as high a degree of
>knowledge as possible should be sought might be more likely to answer
>this question "Very" - that's certainly true of me, anyway. By contrast,
>those who suggest that expert knowledge isn't necessary might tend to
>answer "somewhat" or "not very." I'm looking forward to seeing whether
>I'm right or wrong.
>
>I also notice that, so far, over three-quarters of those who answered
>would not follow their subjects on their own, and that almost half are
>either "not very" or "not at all" interested.
>
>I'm saddened to think that so many people are spending their lives at
>work that they don't especially care for. However, more to the point, I
>strongly suspect that the answers would be very different for
>developers. At least a large minority of geeks are regularly increasing
>their knowledge, and some even program in their spare time for open
>source or free software projects. I wonder: could that be the reason
>that so many tech-writers don't get along with their SMEs? Could the
>geeks unconsciously sense the indifference to the topics that occupy
>large chunkes of their lives?
>
Just because someone is not necessarily interested in
the particular technology that they are documenting
enough to want to spend non-work hours following it
doesn't mean, as you infer above, that "they are
spending their lives at work that they don't especially
care for." Perhaps some writers consider that the work
they are doing is not related so much to the particular
technology as to trying to explain it so that the user
can understand it. The work is the writing itself, not
the technology being documented.
And as for SMEs sensing "indifference," again, just
because writers aren't fascinated by the technology
enough to follow it on their own doesn't mean they
are indifferent to technical explanations or to
understanding it enough themselves that they will
be able to make it understandable to their readers.
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