TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Re: Anyone have a programmer in the doc group? From:Gwen Thomas <gthomas -at- PAYSYS -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 28 Jun 1999 13:43:34 -0500
<Eric_Ray_snip> It seems that, particularly for those of us moving further into
variants of online information and those attempting single-sourcing,
the lines between programming and "writing" are pretty blurry, and
get blurrier the harder you work. </<Eric_Ray_snip>
True, true. The last 2 years I had "Tech writer" somewhere in my title, I spent 7 hours programming/migrating data for every hour writing. My current employer counts me as part of the Data Warehouse group rather than the writing group!
This last year, PaySys International in Orlando (where I've been an employee and am now back implementing Knowledge Management initiatives as a consultant) created a new title for about a fourth of their very large doc group. The Doc Tools Specialists do some writing of doc, mostly for new OO products and help files. But mostly they do database work, evaluate/implement tools, write macros, do VBA and Visual Basic projects - anything technical. The Base Writers and Custom Code Writers are content specialists for the 130 or so "volumes" of legacy doc for mainframe applications. A fourth group, the Documentation Specialists, do production work, Acrobatting, archiving, etc. as well as supporting the writers.
Gwen Thomas
Knowledge Management Consultant
CIBER Information Services, Inc.
