RE: Integrating Tech Pubs more closely with Engineering

["Suzanne Chiles" <suzchiles -at- pobox -dot- com>]

Showing enthusiasm is important. Being enthusiastic is even more important.
I try to work from as positive a position as I can. I may not always agree
completely about the direction a product is taking, but I can always find
features of that product that are elegant or solve a really bad problem or
are just what the customers have been asking for.

I'm not sure if engineers think that whatever they just developed is the
smartest thing on earth. Most of the engineers I've worked are humans just
like the rest of us and often have their own insecurities about the work
they're doing. More than once, just by asking the developer to talk to me
about his or her feature lets them see the really positive points about
their work as well as being able to see places where there may be problems.

Maybe I've been lucky up to now, but I've always enjoyed really good
relationships with the developers I've worked with. Partly, I think, may be
because my father was a professional engineer ... a man who taught me to use
a slide rule so that I could do my 7th grade algebra.

I'm also a frustrated novelist. Mostly frustrated because I've achieved
wonderful things as a technical writer and haven't achieved nearly that much
in my fiction writing, well except for one job where I was enlisted to write
manuals for products that did not yet exist, but if they delivered the
manual, they could collect $$ for it. It wasn't long after that that I
resigned.

I love technical writing. I love grappling with complex technology,
understanding it, and explaining it to the intended user. Maybe I'm lucky
that way. To me, any job where you get to write and play with
software is a fantastic job.

thanks for listening ...
Suzanne Chiles
Portland, OR

-----Original Message-----

What often worked for me was showing enthusiasm for whatever they developed,
telling them how cool it is and that you can't wait to start working on this
cool thing with them. Most engs think that whatever they just developed is
the smartest thing on Earth.
Erika


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