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Ask HN: How terrible is technical writing?

2 points by Ptyx ↗ HN
I have a background in linguistics/literature and been to a few job interviews for a position in technical writing. My impression is that

- a not insignificant part of the job consists of running after the developers and letting them explain to you how their software works or at least to furnish you with further information or explanations. Also, you have to cultivate a sense of when to ask them, when to interrupt their work, and who to ask for what.

- developers don't care too much about the technical documentation and view it rather as a nuisance.

- in the general hierarchy you are quite low, which is probably understandable given the nature of the task. But you are also somewhat of an outsider among a majority of people who have studied computer science.

- only a fraction of the work consists of autonomous tasks. A large part of the time you operate at the intersection of variable often quickly changing circumstances which you have to structure by almost constant interaction.

- in the world of standardization, established stylesheets, translation-friendly texts there is not much room for creative solutions.

How accurate are these vague generalizations?

1 comment

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brudgers
From a literary perspective, technical writing is like any other genre. Good technical writers are deeply read of the canon, it's structures, and idioms. They understand its audiences and their reasons for reading. Their work is ruthlessly edited. Their approach is serious. [1]

The hard part for a person without a technical background is the first. It's hard to empathize with a reader in an area of which the author has no experience. It's hard to know what to research without having a meaningful problem at hand. This can lead to the "designer problem." Absent an interest in the constraints of an important problem, designers will invent interesting problems by adding orthogonal constraints and elevate them to importance.[2]

Creative solutions to technical problems (or technical documentations problems) are only solutions if they solve important problems for other people.

Good luck.

[1] For CS, this suggests grappling with the likes of Knuth, Ableson and Sussman, McConnel, etc.

[2] This suggests research might include trying to learn to program for the same reasons anthropologists might try to learn the craft of an indigenous culture.