Re: Techwriter Aptitude Test (A Daydream)

["Huber, Mike" <mrhuber -at- SOFTWARE -dot- ROCKWELL -dot- COM>]

Same here. A while back I thought I should do a bit of self-improvement,
end the hypocrisy, and develop the RTFM habit. Then I realized that
would tend to weaken my prized ability to see things from the point of
view of the customer.

So I still don't. With amusing results, sometimes. There is a story
somewhere in my personal web site http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2111
about one of those results.

Anyway, the candidate I would go with is the one that could tell me how
to set the clock, or better yet, the one who hands me a sheet of notes
that tell me how to set the clock.

And I mean set the clock, not all those other functions. The guy who
just tells me how to set the clock has focused on what's important.

There might be another candidate who wins out, although this one is too
rare to hold up the hiring process to wait for: the one who invents a
plausible and easily understood theory of operation for the clock that
makes the various controls seem to make sense. By "plausible" I mean
that it's almost certainly not the _real_ theory of operation, which
probably took an advanced degree in digital clock design to understand
before Marketing forced changes that made it completely
incomprehensible.

>-----Original Message-----
>From:  Chris Hamilton [SMTP:chamilton -at- gr -dot- com]
>
>M. Dannenberg wrote:
>>
>> One guy first takes out the instruction leaflet and reads it. After a
>> while he's able to set the time correctly, adjust for time zones, set
>> the alarm and switch between 12 and 24 hour display. Congratulations.
>> You've found your technical writer.
>
>Consider me unemployed, then. Despite my constant suggestions that no
>support call should be answered until the user has RTFMed, I only read
>documentation when I can't figure it out for myself then when I can't
>find someone who knows and ask them. I guess that makes me something of
>a hypocrite when it comes to being a technical writer.
>


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