Re: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years - Help!
My situation is this. I work for a major defense contractor that employs many tech writers. I love the industry, I love the technology, some of the people are pretty cool as well. However, my specific section of the company has not used writers in many years. I am told that years ago an unnamed executive determined that our documents were "too good" and decided to remedy this situation by firing the entire tech pubs department. Since that time the engineers have been doing all their own writing (with the expected result - incredibly bad documentation).ea!
There are numerous cases where Managers, Senior Managers, Directors, VPs, Chief Engineers, Senior Lead Engineers, and so on, have spent and continue to spend many of their highly paid hours on very poor documentation. The most recent example of this absurdity is the recently instituted Peer Review process which, at the moment, seems to involve a group of (usually very senior) people sitting around looking for critical program errors in documents that have never been touched by a writer. The bulk of the review time is spent in doing a bad job of what a writer could do much better and much more quickly. About 90% of their "findings" include things like typos and consistency that are listed right along with actual program problems related to legality, feasibility, compliance, and so on. In a similar vein we have Technical Program Managers spending hours and hours on such trivial tasks as fine tuning acronym lists and Chief Engineers insisting on manually numbering all their h
dings and graphics and refusing to let me auto number anything (in Word).<snip>
The wasted man-hours here are absolutely staggering. The number of high-level people doing a poor job of writing and editing is profoundly disturbing to me. The number of programmers and engineers writing docs rather than doing any actual programming or engineering never ceases to amaze me. Although I joined the company in 2001, I only began working in an official tech writer capacity here earlier this year - after extensive lobbying. Even then, it has been an uphill battle. Very few people here comprehend what it is that I do - they think I'm some kind of formatter who "pretties up" documents just before they go out the door - at least that tiny percentage of the documentation that ever crosses my desk in the first place - most of it continues to be done by engineers and I am not remotely involved.
In an effort to keep this somewhat brief let me present some of the specific problems:
One problem here is that tech writing is considered "tech pubs" with the emphasis on the very end of the program - getting stuff out the door. My current manager is very much in this vein. He is a logistician with 21 years in the Marines. He is not a writer - in fact his e-mails are barely literate. However, he has told me quite firmly that he does not want me involved in building the technical writing department and he has this strange idea that writers must be stovepiped - one per program and never the twain shall meet. He seems to think that there is no reason why a tech writer (me) would or should be remotely involved in, say, determining staffing requirements, writing reqs, reviewing resumes, and interviewing candidates.
Sounds like the company is being paid on a cost + basis, or it makes lots of money from support work.
That type of crap goes on in lots of places. Although we usually care about the quality of our own work, stressing over the work of others and/or company policy is not and should not be an option.
If something out of my control bothered me to the point where my health was in jeopardy, I would seek other employment. (I know, easier said than done,) but you will do nobody any good from your coffin.
--
Peter
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Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years - Help!: From: Anne . Miller
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