In the Land of the Buttless, the Half-Assed Man is King

["Robert Plamondon" <robert -at- plamondon -dot- com>]

The two words in the term "technical writer" imply a two-part test. In my
experience, a passing score for "technical writer" is 50% in the more
demanding organizations -- you need to be either technical or a writer.

In other outfits, a score of 0% is all that's expected. The documents are
written by someone in Sales, Marketing, or Engineering, and the "technical
writers" are combination DTP operators, copy-editors, and secretaries.
These tasks, though important, do not add up to "technical writer" by any
rational measure. I have interviewed "technical writers" who were very well
regarded, though they had no discernable technical skills and had never
written a line.  One such writer, with fifteen years' experience, was
visibly startled at a job interview by the concept of writing his own copy.

I'm usually in the semiconductor hardware market segment, and in this area
the phenomenon is exaggerated.  The target audience is almost always
engineers, not consumers, so the theory that the writer is a surrogate user
requires substantial technical background. Also, relatively few writers seem
interested in semiconductors; they're crowded into the software field.
Electrical engineers seem to be self-selected for a lack of interest in
writing (perhaps the job is more visual, while software is more verbal --
the use of imagery in hardware engineering and computer languages in
software implies this).

After twenty years in this line of work, I've run into relatively few
"technical writers" who showed any evidence of training or experience on the
technical side -- perhaps two or three with engineering degrees and five or
six who had been engineering technicians or gained experience in some other
way, out of sheafs of resumes and quite a few interviews and writers met
socially.

In the semiconductor industry, being "technical" is a pretty good meal
ticket, since a technical writer who writes poorly can take over the
documentation burden from an engineer who writes poorly. This allows
engineering to proceed at a greater pace and is a great relief to the
engineer. If the documentation is no worse than before, this is of
tremendous net benefit to the company.

If the applicant pool allows the luxury of choice, then obviously someone
who is equally technical and is a better writer would get the nod.

But lists of ideal qualifications rarely come into play in a job market with
very few qualified candidates.  In the land of the buttless, the half-assed
man is king.

	-- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon
President, High-Tech Technical Writing
robert -at- plamondon -dot- com
http://www.plamondon.com/HIGHTECH/homepage.html
(541) 453-5841
"We're Looking for a Few Good Clients"



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