Re: Desperately seeking employment (and why)

[Mike Stockman <stockman -at- JAGUNET -dot- COM>]

On 7/13/1999 7:45 PM, Joe Schrengohst (jschreng -at- CISCO -dot- COM) wrote this
unbelievable piece of opinion:

>And today most "technical writing"
>positions are filled with people (mostly women) who have the
>English or Journalism degrees, but haven't the foggiest idea
>about the technology they are supposed to describe, which,
>I contend, has resulted in the bad press that many "technical
>manuals" have received over the past few years.

I'll ignore your senseless and irrelevant diatribe about women in
technical writing, since I couldn't actually tell what your point was.
I'll just address the quote above.

I have strong memories of the manuals in those "Golden Years" you're
referring to, back when they were full of wonderful technical information
that was so poorly written and badly organized that only somebody who
already knew the information could make sense of it, and those people
didn't need it at all. The stories about lousy technical manuals started
back when the first technical manual was written, and they haven't
stopped since.

It's possible that technical knowledge has gone down while writing and
organizational skills have gone up... I think that we haven't lost much
tech. knowledge compared to the huge gains in readability, but that's a
matter of opinion.

I think you're viewing the distant past years as if they're the "good old
days," and you need to get more realistic. Bad old manuals sucked in
different ways than the bad new manuals suck, and there were good ones
then, and there are good ones now. Try to let yourself see them; you'll
enjoy this field much more.

----->Mike

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