RE: Employee experience dilemma....

["Locke, David" <dlocke -at- bindview -dot- com>]

Guy asks:

>Can the company afford to invest in the new writer?

The TW industry has a problem. Everyone wants to be a consultant, because
that is the only way people can make any real money in this industry. So we
hire in a one TW, one product/project/document manner. The idea is that
every one of those writers should be capable of self management. They should
be a lead. So as an industry we have no intermediate steps between being a
writer and a documentation manager. We have documentation managers who
write, because there is very little notion of what a documentation manager
is supposed to do. You have to be lucky rather than experienced to get your
first documentation management job. 

And, if you've been in this field for more than say six years, you may be
changing tools, but the job doesn't change. It's just another year of
experience.

Some companies have leads, they have jr. TWs, sr. TWs, and co-ops. This
requires management and supervisors. These companies can afford to train
people, because there are defined salary bands rather than a bunch of
expensive lead/self-management capable individuals. And, these writers have
a clear career path.  If you 

  * Stop hiring expensive help
  * Organize yourself around leads who writes and implements doc plans
  * Make your leads do project management 
  * Make your leads into leaders
  * Make your leads represent the TW function
  * Make leads responsible to the doc manager
  * Assign a lead to several projects at once, so you can divide the 
    responsibilities between lead and staff
  * Assign writers who are assigned to projects on an as needed basis

you will find

  * That the poisson distribution (backend loading) of effort will flatten
  * Less experienced writers can be assigned to documents, because 
    they will receive adequate direction
  * Experienced writers will stay in the field, because they have a career
with growth
  * There will be less burnout

When a department has two writers, one should be a lead as a minimum and the
other one should not. But, you have to hire in a way that creates a
department rather than a loosely associated bunch of writers. 

When a department grows to five writers, a documentation manager should be
needed. Somebody has to be responsible for staffing, bugets, tools
acquisition, mission, vision, strategy, staff development, and overall
direction. That person cannot really do their job if they are still writing,
or coordinating a large number of direct reports. In Atticus'es situation,
where their is no doc manager, he needs to act like a doc manager and not an
employee if he intends to aspire to the job. Complaining, finger pointing,
and making excuses is not the way to get the job. Being a leader is. Learn
to persuade. Be political in your representation of the department, or
interdepartmentally rather than intradepartmental. You will not rise by
dragging other people down.

One of the ways we as a profession can get more respect is by being more
business and organizationally oriented. If you want to be a consultant,
fine. Quit your job and go for it. But, if you want to be a successful,
happy, and long-term TW, create opportunities for growth.

Now to the question of what can be afforded, software startups cannot afford
to act like institutional software companies. But, for a given lump sum
budget, I can put more people to work by getting organized, using people's
experience and human-side skills, leveraging my tool experts, hiring editors
and graphics artists, and having processes. 

We could be happy in this field for a lifetime without becoming a
consultant. We could get more respect for our work from management. We could
get management to see our value-add as something more significant and more
complex than just reducing technical support calls, and getting an analyst
to give us a check in the documentation checkbox of our product reviews.
It's up to us. And, it is up to us at that critical moment when a department
grows to more than two people.

David W. Locke