Re: The Worst Thing About Contracting
Contract software technical writers (or at least<discussion about turf - and defense of said turf - snipped>
all that I have know) are basically wordprocessors. And they are
locked into that mode by the very nature of most businesses.
One thing about money - it tends, eventually, to lure most of the best technical writers away from "captive" employment because it represents an option different from writing the same ol' stuff about the same ol' systems.
Developers who get into turf warfare usually wind up losing, simply because to defend a single piece of turf for a long while requires that you disregard what's happening elsewhere in the marketplace. Look at Microsoft's recent reorganization, and the criticism from within the organization that turf wars and other organizational dilemmas had resulted in the company's development efforts getting stale and reactive, rather than fresh and proactive. Since captive technical writers who play the turf game tend to get locked into particular development groups, I'd posit that the writers who play turf games tend to get stale and reactive, too.
Contractors tend to get called in to solve immediate problems. Sometimes these are problems that the current crop of captive writers are unqualified to handle - either because of skill levels, the demands of other projects, or simply because they don't know a particular technology. Sometimes there are simply not enough captives on staff to handle what needs to be done. Contractors tend to be regarded as disposable, too: once they've whupped some project into shape, it can be safely handed off to a captive to maintain and the contractor is no longer needed. (One of the most common signs of this is a company making a massive push for a product release or some major turnaround; once the immediate push is over, the contractors tend to get released en masse, largely because the finance department, which has probably been yelling at the developers for spending too much money on contractors, is finally being listened to by senior management. A wise contractor can see this one coming and knows to start lining up other things.)
However the point that Tony made that most contractors are simply word processors is very far off the mark, at least in Silicon Valley. Here, contractors live and die by their resumes: if all they had to sell was word processing skills, they wouldn't be in much demand since there are plenty of admins out there who can do word processing. The contractors I know who are making a living at it are valued not just because of their word processing skills, but because they're capable of thinking like programmers or engineers, sometimes contributing to the design of a product, they have a fairly large set of adaptable skills related to many aspects of publishing, they tend to be good project managers, and they usually have a breadth of experience in technical domains that isn't usually found in garden-variety captive technical writers.
And if the worst thing about contracting is that you don't have to participate in turf wars, I'd say we're better off.
Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems
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