RE: permalancers

Subject: RE: permalancers
From: "John Rosberg" <jrosberg -at- interwoven -dot- com>
To: "Technical Writer" <tekwrytr -at- hotmail -dot- com>, "Combs, Richard" <richard -dot- combs -at- polycom -dot- com>, <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:37:43 -0600

Wryter -- having lived through several tech boom-bust cycles, you have
accurately described events, sure enough.

I know of no organization that has successfully offshored any effort as
cleanly and efficiently as you've described, however (I've been involved
with a few, though, clearly, not all).

While "chunking" a project to the point that any any competent writer
can complete the job may be entirely valid when discussing the design of
cordless drills, seltbelt retractors, or wireless modems (read,
commodities), organizations involved developing more complex, innovative
products and applications have a great need for experienced,
well-rounded folks in all their jobs, writers included.

Of course, there are folks that match this requirement all over the
world, available at a broad range of rates, so part of "management's"
responsibility is finding the best cost/benefit deal possible including,
of course, time to market, ease of communications, and many other
factors above and beyond salary and benefits).

Lastly, while it certainly MAY be cheaper to train an engineer to do an
acceptable job of documentation than it is to pay the writer to become
technologically savvy enough to do the job, after more years than I care
to remember, I can think of very few engineers that wanted to do so --
most of those years, btw, were spent working with engineers for whom US
English was a primary language.

This Technical Writer as technologist vs Engineer as Writer debate has
been going on since the mid 1970, that I know of, and will likely
continue for the foreseeable future. While I do not disagree with you
entirely, there are still Tech Writers, more of em, though not all where
they were 20 years ago.

Not a debate, sure, and your opinion is as valid as anyone else's,
clearly, but an interesting conversation, nonetheless.

rosberg
-----Original Message-----
From: Technical Writer [mailto:tekwrytr -at- hotmail -dot- com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 7:00 PM
To: Combs, Richard; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: permalancers


Richard Combs wrote:

<quote>
I suppose, if you're focused entirely on skills and dismiss knowledge
asunimportant, and if you think of a tech writing career as just
asequence of short-term assignments doing rote work in fields you
knownothing about, this may make some sense. And if that's your
perspective,I suppose "adds value" is indeed a foreign concept. Some of
us have a different perspective. Fortunately, so do ouremployers. That's
why they pay us the big bucks. :-) Richard</quote>

Not at all. "doing rote work in fields you know nothing about" is about
as far from technical writing as it is possible to get. That is more on
the order of "technical secretaries," of whom there are an
ever-increasing number, quite capable of handling the major portion of
repetitive writing.

A few years back, quite a number of "software developers" fancied
themselves invaluable, because of their experience (primarily) and
skills (secondarily). When the dotcom greed campaign shakeout happened,
a lot of $100K programmers were replaced by relative newbies in
Bangalore. Employers soon discovered that the $100K programmers might be
worth a bit more than the typical Bangalore keyboard jockey, but nowhere
near 10 times as much.

That is, for half the salary of the typical Silicon Valley developer,
one could hire four or five well-educated, highly-skilled Bangalore
programmers, and a crackerjack PM to assure all went well. The same
situation exists in technical writing now; as important as individual
experience and skill may be, the negative is that it is individual.

My argument is simply that such a situation is a failure of management.
If a project cannot be chunked down to the point of task completion by
(almost any) skilled, competent technical writer, it is a failure of the
BA, the PM, and whoever is running the IT department to do their jobs.
If they had done their jobs, the notion of a particular technical writer
being "essential" is ludicrous.

This is not a debate. It is just my opinion. If you have managed to
convince your employer that you are worth whatever amount of money you
are being paid, that is irrelevant to the overall situation. Best hang
on to that job for dear life; your next employer may be a bit more in
tune with the real world.

Finally, in regard to dismissing knowledge as unimportant, that is
precisely the point. Why hire a technical writer who is "experienced"
(writing about, not doing) a particular task, when I can hire an expert
practitioner in the field for an equivalent or lesser amount?

It is certainly less expensive to train a competent engineer to write
well enough (that old "satisficing" trip) than to train a technical
writer to write about a topic that requires engineering knowledge. If
the technical writer actual understood the topic as well as the
engineer, why would he or she be writing about it rather than doing it?

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RE: permalancers: From: Technical Writer

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