Life in docs 2018 survey — Part 1: Results

What is the life of a technical writer like in 2018? This is a question I asked earlier in the year. And you replied.

When I announced that Corilla would open source all of our surveys I did so to push ourselves further in our journey towards being an open organisation. And also to encourage us all to check in on our industry and culture more regularly. So to that end I say thank you to everyone that participated — as a personal note I really appreciate the honesty and effort put into your answers.

As we’re about to see, the morale in technical writing is surprisingly high. But so are the challenges facing teams shifting increasingly towards constant change. In structure, in product, and even in workflows and our very identity as content professionals. Let’s take a look.

A Note on data

The following is a narrative analysis of the results. An easy way to read this is to skip through the graphs and dig into the insights in whatever question you find most interesting. I suggest grabbing the anonymised source data from the repo for your own analysis. And then moving on to Life in docs 2018 survey — Part 2: Insights for a deep dive into what this data all means.

Overall we were aiming for 100 replies to the survey — intending to run them regularly (hence the…