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I've done a couple of Programmer Writer contracts in the last few years.
In my experience, companies who use this job title are not looking to
cut costs by avoiding hiring two separate people, but to improve
documentation quality for deveolper products such as tools or SDKs. The
title is used to distinguish these sorts of positions from those
concerned mainly with end-user documentation.
The fact that "programmer" comes first in the job title does not even
necessarily mean that it is primarily a programming position. Both of
my PW contracts (one at Microsoft, one at another company) both involved
much more writing than programming. In fact, I did more coding to _get_
the Microsoft gig than I did during my entire year working there,
although some programming knowledge was essential to the job.
--
Jerry Kindall, SDK Technical Writer
Tecplot, Inc. | Enjoy the View
Bellevue, Washington, USA
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