Re: Fear and Loathing at the Job Site

[Gene Kim-Eng <gene -at- genek -dot- com>]

Good question.  When I first made the transition from engineer
to writer, subject matter expertise was critical, and the company
actually maintained a staff of nonexempts to do the formatting
and other document production because their writer/engineers
were supposed to be concentrating on content rather than
spending their time wrestling with buggy publishing software.
If anything, my shortcomings as a writer continue to be in the
areas of "font fondling" rather than technical knowledge.
Perhaps that's the thing that's kept me in contracts this year, that
because I'm not a DTP whiz I tend to create docs with *really*
simple templates that concentrate on the technical content. But
these days it's pretty rare for a company to tell its writers that
they shouldn't be wasting their time doing work that someone
can be hired to do at a third of their cost, most companies have
combined the work of both into one and devalued the combined
job description.  I just ran across an ad for a "technical writer"
in Colorado that offered - believe it - an hourly rate of $5.50.
Sheesh.

Gene Kim-Eng


At 01:29 PM 5/6/2003 -0700, Steven Brown wrote: