Technical writing is a difficult skill to be proficient at, so I think dedicated technical writers are needed in many companies. I’ve also not really seen writers be “blown off”. More often I see an absence entirely of writers, but that’s usually more to do with budgeting more than anything else. Where I’ve had writers working with me, we’re generally thankful to have someone proficient at it handling things.

With that said, I don’t really see the English major idea panning out well, just as bootstrapping a project with a bunch of CS grads probably wouldn’t. The study and analysis of literature is tangentially connected with technical writing for commercial purposes.

They can, of course, become good technical writers over time, but a huge component of what writers bring is an understanding of the audience. It goes beyond being able to write well, and academic writing is different from commercial writing.

We actually have an internship program with English graduate students to be tech writers for our data science groups. They're wonderful, and I will sing their praises anywhere I can. Having people whose primary skill is knowing how to write is extremely undervalued in Corporate America. If you're only using technical writers to help with documentation, you're doing it wrong.

I don't think people with good writing skills are undervalued. Good writers just do other jobs than technical docs most of the time. They go to marketing/advertising.

It helps when tech writer is (semi)embedded with the agile team. I worked at a company where the writer would rotate between 3 teams, join daily standups and sit side-by-side with devs in kind of pair programming/docs sessions. That worked very well. It can also be used to tackle 'docs debt' when issues on the tracker are explicitly dedicated to transfer fuzzy-knowledge-in-experts-head into docs, in order to catch up. If you don't plan docs efforts well in sprints, you get devs thinking "Oh no, annoying tech writer is coming to my desk to distract me, and I'm so busy". Foster a culture that includes attention to quality docs.

I don't really think technical writers are held in same contempt as project managers. They don't make life hell for engineers without knowing shit. At least they understand the tech more than project manager who just tries to move tickets and create meaningless metrics.

On the other hand, why would you hire English majors without any technical background for technical writing? At least you should give them some training before letting them work.

Years ago Wrox Press got me to come in and give a basic Java programming course to the tech editors who were going to work on a series of Java books. They were mainly English and history grads, and the head man wanted them to have some idea of what they were working with. It definitely made the whole writing process easier from the pov of the author.

> No engineer values tech writers

Not in my experience. Many engineers value tech writers — and reap many benefits from this relationship.

I write documentation about German bureaucracy for a living, and I’ve even never received so much praise in my life. It’s heartwarming.

Developers also appreciate useful posts and good documentation. I often leave comments or send emails to praise useful posts. We come to recognise domains with good answers in the search results.

However this might not translate to appreciation by the business. I can’t deny that.

Companies do not as a general rule value tech writers. They seldom hire them.

Tech writers get paid less than other profiles, so why would you do it if they company did hire them.

PMs do not set time aside for programmers to do tech writing, nor do they set time aside for them to talk to tech writers if tech writers are hired. Thus programmers are taught to blow off tech writers in favor of making their ticket move through the scrum board quicker. n

One scenario I've seen this work differently in is a regulated market where the technical documentation is part of submission etc. - so if it's not right, you don't have a product.

In this case they likely work for the RA/QA team, and likely can hold engineers accountable for some things, and the engineering team will definitely feel heat from above if they are holding up or derailing the documentation and labelling efforts.

In this scenario I've seen many engineers genuinely help and value the tech writers - even if only out of fear of becoming responsible for the docs.

One of the most hilarious ironies about technical writing is that the writer has to do so much more reasoning about the system as an interconnected and operating system so they can describe how the user interacts with that system. I think you're correct about how PMs and technical writers are regarded and, as sad as it is, the truth is that engineers are usually rewarded through moving tickets from Not Started to Finished instead of building working and reasonable systems. If "finishing" tickets is where the money is, taking the time to reason about how any ticket fits into a coherent and correct system is an expensive process. More often than not, people are not successful because their projects are so good but that the project was good enough, long enough, and they moved on to greener pastures before the mistakes caught up with the system.

Tech writers are like the hub in a team-wheel. What they learn, they amplify and share. It's the greatest ROI of all the team positions.

Hats off to our under-appreciated friends, the writers.

P.S. I once worked at a place where many of the Engineering managers started out in Tech Writing. It made perfect sense, because the writers had to know everything to document it. A good Engineer will master one tiny sliver, plus may have knowledge of a few adjacent parts. The Writer hears/sees/writes it all.