Re: senior writer promotion

[Kevin McLauchlan <kmclauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com>]

On Thursday 10 October 2002 10:41, Joe Campo wrote:
> I could not find any info in the 2001/2002 archives on
> this, so I am posting this.
>
> Can writers with the title "senior writer" give details
> about how they received this title?
> What were the qualifications used to grant you this
> title? Did you have to pass some exam, or was your
> performance rated against established parameters?
> Did you have to be a writer for X number of years?
> Was it just a title promotion?
> or
> Did you receive a salary increase, and if yes, what
> percentage?

I'm not entirely sure why I have the title, but that's 
what appears on my job description. It's the label 
they put on me when I came to this company 4-1/2 
years ago.  Not sure if HR took it out of a book, 
or if the Veep of Engineering who hired me just 
thought it sounded nice.  :-)

The salary increased, but only incidentally. I came 
to this company when the wife and I decided to 
emigrate from Montreal to Canada in 1998.  ;->

I am a one-man customer documentation crew, 
meaning that I'm responsible for the guts of the 
customer documentation, from start to release, 
and all maintenance.
The graphic designer guy does the covers, but 
every other aspect is mine. Mine, I say.

I don't always have final decision power as to 
what will be produced, because I'm satisfying 
customers, in-house and out-house <g>, but 
what usually happens is that I end up telling them 
what it is they want, and then giving them what 
I told them they wanted.

I negotiate schedules and revise them as 
conditions change.

I have supervised others, in the past, but never 
actually managed them for extended periods.

A novice would be totally lost, and a junior 
would turn into an intermediate by taking over 
my job. On the other hand, I basically created 
my job, just as I did in at least one previous gig. 
However, I'm in a niche that currently 
does not involve any online help and not much 
html stuff.  In a sense, I think that makes me 
not well rounded enough to be truly a "senior" 
writer. 

On the other hand, I could step into almost 
any situation and start creating usable documents 
for the client.  I say "almost" because I'd be as 
overwhelmed as anybody if the industry was totally 
new to me and I didn't have time to get my bearings.
But given a project-span of months, rather than days, 
I have no doubt about my capabilities. 

If somebody tossed a set of jet-liner blue-prints, 
or the design specs of a nuclear plant in front of me, 
I'd do a fair bit of slow blinking before I started making 
coherent noises, but I'd eventually make sense of 
them and start writing docs for techs or pilots or 
whatever... but not before pestering a lot of engineers 
and techs and mechanics, and getting my hands dirty, 
to find out what they really need.

I've never had formal training, and never taken an 
exam or certification of any kind in "Tech Writing" 
or whatever. My education was electronics, when 
the early microprocessors were being turned into 
whiz-bang devices like the IBM PC... woohoo.
But I read about all sorts of obscure stuff and other 
disciplines, and am not limited to that niche. I'm a 
generalist.  I have no medical training, but I can hold 
my head above water when reading pubs like the Lancet 
or the New England Journal of Medicine, and I'm 
considerably further up the curve on nutrition than most 
doctors. 

I'm not a math or statistics whiz, but I know enough 
to get uncomfortable when people are bending or 
misreading data and statistical derivations. But then,
I still buy lottery tickets... go figure.

Give me 14 pounds of nicely refined plutonium, and I'll 
reduce your neighborhood to radioactive slag (I might need 
to borrow a pinch of TNT to get it started...). I've been 
through the mill of ISO-9000 (I was part of the 
working committee that made it happen for Ericsson 
in Montreal). I've done some instructing. I've been service 
support for one of the big consumer-electronics giants,
back when they had a computer division.

I'm not the most intelligent person you've 
ever met, but I'm fairly bright and.... interested.
I thrive on learning things and communicating 
them to other people, and I've had many years of 
practice in group and one-man-band settings.
I am not a "business-man", per se, but I know 
how businesses work, how products are developed, 
how regulatory compliance works, and I've had a bit 
of exposure to co-ordinating translation/localization
(though not in recent years).

Senior writer?  You tell me.  What IS that, anyway?

Um, I'll turn 50 in another year-and-a-bit... does that 
count?

/kevin


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