Working as an Information/Technical Developer

siblers

Hi,
Just wondering if any people here have any experience working as an Information Developer (also a technical writer if I am correct) or working alongside someone in that role. If so, how did ye/they find it? Does it become quite tedious working on technical documents or is it a bit more varied? Is it a limited role wiht little scope for promotion or career advancement etc.?
Thanks

John_Mc

siblers wrote: »

Hi,
Just wondering if any people here have any experience working as an Information Developer (also a technical writer if I am correct) or working alongside someone in that role. If so, how did ye/they find it? Does it become quite tedious working on technical documents or is it a bit more varied? Is it a limited role wiht little scope for promotion or career advancement etc.?
Thanks

Pretty sure every single developer absolutely hates writing documentation, no matter how important it is. You'll only be getting one type of answer from developers on here I'd say!

That role would be my idea of hell

Buford T Justice

John_Mc wrote: »

That role would be my idea of hell

This.

14ned

siblers wrote: »

Hi,
Just wondering if any people here have any experience working as an Information Developer (also a technical writer if I am correct) or working alongside someone in that role. If so, how did ye/they find it? Does it become quite tedious working on technical documents or is it a bit more varied? Is it a limited role wiht little scope for promotion or career advancement etc.?
Thanks

I've worked alongside dedicated technical writers in the past. They are very often female former software engineers who needed to go part time for their kids, and the only part time role available is as technical writer at quarter the pay. But it is what it is.

There is a huge difference between when a dev is asked "to do up some docs" in a few days versus being allocated actual real time and resources to write real documentation. Generally a dedicated technical writer is properly scheduled, and will undergo multiple iterations of writing up docs for something, running it past naive users of varying skill levels, and only asking the authoring devs when he or she can't figure out a missing bit from the source code on their own.

It's a world of difference from how most docs are written.

Pretty sure every single developer absolutely hates writing documentation, no matter how important it is. You'll only be getting one type of answer from developers on here I'd say!

That role would be my idea of hell

I hate being rushed to do half arsed docs to tick a box saying "we wrote some docs for this code we just finished".

I don't mind doing decent docs. But if it took three months to write a library, you need to be thinking two months plus additional to write decent docs for it. As a dev, they never allocate you sufficient time to do a decent job of it e.g. snippets of usage patterns one per API, sample programs demonstrating usage etc. That's what makes it hell. You need to be not rushed and have nothing else pressing to do to write decent docs.

And I suppose at my rate of pay it's inefficient to give me the time, it's more efficient to employ a technical writer at half my marginal cost.

Niall