Re: wannabe tech writer

[kcronin -at- daleen -dot- com]

In response to Bruce's post, I don't find tech writing to be as
economically limiting as Bruce asserts. While I started out at a much
lower entry salary than his estimates, I have enjoyed continuous upward
growth, both in my responsibilities and my pay.

While it's true you'll never become a millionaire developing online help,
you can continually acquire new skills that are related to tech writing,
which in turn can positively affect your value to your employer (and with
it, your paycheck), without resorting to becoming a pointy-haired manager.

Much of the online training that is becoming popular these days is
developed by tech writers (or should be); there are proposals and RFPs to
be written; intranets and database-driven Web sites and knowledge bases to
be developed and managed -  to my eyes it's open ended. And if you did
choose to take your knowledge of the documentation process and became a
manager who actually knew what he or she was doing (gasp!), would that
really be a bad thing?

If you're saying that you can't ascend to stellar economic heights by just
sitting in your cube waiting for the latest version of a product to be
dropped off at your desk so you can fire up FrameMaker and write "Getting
Started with the WidgetMaster, version XXX" for the next ten years, you're
probably right. If you stand still at your job, you can expect your income
to do likewise.

But even if that's your approach (which, incidentally, I think is fine
too; our lives don't HAVE to be ruled by our career ambitions), I submit
that tech writing is the most consistently lucrative WRITING career there
is, outside of being a best-selling author or famous columnist.

And that seemed to be Bruce's point - the money you could make while
sticking to WRITING. I say it's there for the taking. Again, YMMV.




 - Keith Cronin

_____________________________________


This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me.
Silly stuff. Nothing in it.

 - Eeyore


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