Re: What's the most technical task you ever did as part of your job?

[Wade Courtney <wade -dot- courtney -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Harpoon Missile Firing Doctrine and Procedures...


On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 2:45 PM, William Sherman
<bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com>wrote:

> I used to never think that my work was that highly technical, as it was
> just something all my coworkers and I did as part of the job. But compared
> to some things I've done recently, I guess it was pretty good stuff for the
> time.
>
> F15 Avionics and Electronic Warfare stuff. Don't ask, I won't tell.
> Writers were Data Engineers, and were expected to write that stuff with
> minimum interaction with the design engineers, working strictly from
> drawings, prints, schematics, and on the bird access. Back then, there were
> hundreds of us. Today, they do it with a dozen or so.
>
> Motorola cellular systems, not just the phone, but the entire system of
> software and the cellular units that make those little phones work. This
> was back when most phones were the size of a brick or larger and maybe you
> knew someone who had a cellular phone.
>
> Helicopter stuff. Igor Sikorsky was obviously the first person to heavily
> use drugs, based on how he ever figured out how to make one fly.
>  Everything after that had to be equally as insane.  Rube Goldberg was a
> lightweight.
>
> One of those San Jose network companies with switches, routers, and such.
> Again, it seemed normal at the time to configure and run them, but
> apparently, they still consider that stuff high tech.
>
> Big Blue got into robots and it was one fun project. In a land of dark
> blue suits, white shirts, and ties, we would have some days in tee shirts
> and jeans as we tore the robots apart in the lab.
>
>
> The really sad part is that in most jobs, there would be dozens or more
> technical writers doing a job, all of them highly technical. Now there
> seems to be 3 or 4 at most and often the writer is barely above a secretary
> in writing skill.  Of course, many want to pay at that same low level. I
> worked with a guy not long ago complaining about rates in Orlando. His
> explanation was the low rates and poor quality were due to actions of one
> STC member years ago to convert housewives into technical writers with a
> tech writing degree in the local college. They knew all about writing,
> Word, and such, but had zero technical background, and would work for
> secretary wages as the STC person/instructor told them that was the going
> pay.
>
> Hope I'm not offending anyone on here who lives or lived in Orlando.
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Lauriston" <
> robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>
> To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 2:26 PM
> Subject: What's the most technical task you ever did as part of your job?
>
>
>
>  The most technical task I've ever had to do as a tech writer was
>> probably setting up a VMware virtual network to test a DBMS monitoring
>> / security tool. I had six separate VMs: Linux running the monitoring
>> tool, Windows Server running SQL Server, Solaris running Oracle,
>> Windows running the monitoring tool's admin client, and Windows and
>> Linux to run test queries against SQL Server and Oracle.
>>
>> Oddly, the single most difficult part was getting the Oracle client
>> running on Linux. Oracle's docs were incomplete, so I had to get a
>> field engineer to help.
>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^**^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>
>
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