RE: Interesting Article... fewest jobs lost in Tech Writing

["Dan Hall" <dhall -at- san-carlos -dot- rms -dot- slb -dot- com>]

"Ah, but docs are part of the product as much as the GUI is." 

I think I disagree here...

For us, as technical writers, and frequently as the only user
advocates involved in the product development lifecycle, the
documentation seems essential. It's easy to confuse something
of value with something vital. Sure a GUI is of value - but
I write documentation for several CLI programs (on UNIX) and 
they seem to work fine without one. Since all our users are
UNIX geeks anyway, a GUI would just get in the way.

For most of the "team", the product is the product, and the
documentation is not. :-) That's an important conceptual 
distinction. I am not arguing that the docs aren't
an important ancillary item, but to most of the managers, 
engineers, etc., they are the "packaging", not product. To
them, (and the votes with layoff power are the ones that 
count in this discussion) you might as well say "the box
art is part of the product as much as the 2 million lines 
of code..." They're not going to buy that - they'd say they
could sell the product in a plain brown wrapper. Could they
sell it as well? Nope, but they'd argue that it would sell.

I use Word pretty much every day, and I've never read any 
Word documentation. But if Word wasn't coded, or didn't have
a GUI, I'd be in tough shape. 

I'm not sure how we can agree on this, since there's a fine
distinction being drawn - but the distinction's important to
me: it helps me keep perspective when there's a hitch in the 
doc process. :-)

Dan

Dan Hall
Sr. Technical Writer
SchlumbergerSema RTEMS

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