Re: A dark take on Tech Writing...do you agree?

[voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com>]

The era where you can get a job with one employer and work your way up the
ladder, in *any* field is long gone. (Academia and the Civil Service being
the only exceptions), and was out the door at least a decade before the dot
com bust. And the tech writers/writing departments at all the companies I
have worked were part of the R&D department, whether we were embedded with
the project as part of the development team or a separate writing
department.

I also remember one period of time where the writers were "justifying our
existence" by taking metrics in calls to Tech Support - we had hard numbers
showing that quality product documentation reduced these calls, hence we
added value by saving the company money.

What nobody could ever get funding for, in the 15+ years I've been working
as a writer, was converting to single-source. It's been talked about at
every single job I've had, but it's never been implemented, because nobody
wanted to pay for it.

-Wendy

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:54 PM, Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
As for "careers" (by the way, my father is a semi-retired doctor - a GP -
one of the last of the breed)...I tend to think of that in the old terms
which had connotations of long-term retention and chances of advancement
within an industrial hierarchy.  Yes every career is a succession of jobs if
you want to raise the quibble that you don't do exactly the same thing every
year. My point was, in the great majority of cases, the succession of jobs
in technical writing does not carry any possibilities of upwards mobility.
 "Upwards mobility" meaning related increases in pay, responsibilities,
authority, and position on the org chart, within the same org. The old-style
idea of a career as was possible for an IBM engineer or an advertising
agency manager isn't possible in technical writing. In this field, the
"career" consists entirely of doing the same kind of work at 9 different
companies over the span of 14 years. Unless you find the right company to
work
 for, there may be increases in pay and chances to work into some sort of
management function, but those will be disjointed in time and work location.
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