What does a tech writer do?
As one of the most famous bards in the world once put it:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts, […]
William Shakespeare - “All the world’s a stage”
Just like actors get to play many roles in their careers, the same goes for technical writers. They embark on different roles in their career varying from programming to marketing. I played many roles in my career and this post will tell you more about them. One of the biggest and best companies dealing with information management describes technical writers as “a key link tying together many vital but disparate parts of the Google ecosystem”.
Intro
In one of our previous blog posts, we wrote how well-written documentation can boost the growth of your product and company. We also introduced a technical writer to this equation. In this blog post, we will tell you more about the job of a technical writer.
Technical writers are mostly associated with writing documentation, however, this description doesn’t do justice to tech writers. It may have held true 100 years ago when the tech comm was in its infancy (at the onset of the 20th century during World War I) but these days technical writers need to be hybrids in the fast-changing world. Nevertheless, the bias still remains. Below, I will enumerate some of the hats tech writers wear nowadays.
Audiovisual hat
You hear documentation, you mostly think of words. But, that is not the case. Documentation can come in many formats through which technical writers become “movie directors” and “voiceover actors”. Producing videos is becoming a popular and go-to approach in today’s tech comm practices. So, technical writers are expected to produce videos that complement all sorts of online help material.
This trend, in turn, makes tech writers step up their work skill set. They need to stay on top of the best video editing software and work on their voice.
Whenever there’s a complex GUI (graphical user interface) e.g. Photoshop, one of the best methods of showing how these GUI works is through videos. They’re easier to follow and easier to replicate what the instructor is doing. I worked on documenting a no-code tool that abstracted the intricacies of artificial intelligence for subject matter experts e.g. doctors, scientists etc. where videos and narration were critical to showing how the tool worked.
Programming hat
Working on documentation doesn’t only involve writing documents. There is a lot of programmatic work invisible to the user. When you access a documentation website, you don’t wonder about the technology that was used to host the website, what engine was used to generate the HTML output, whether it’s a website written from scratch, a CMS, or what kind of scripts were written to automate documentation work.
These things and more fall into a tech writer’s remit. In my career, I had to use several static site generators in my projects to create a documentation website. Their power lies in simplicity and maintainability, however, a tech writer has to know some scripting languages and html/css/js to customize the functionality and look&feel of the website. Not to mention, documenting APIs and SDKs requires programming knowledge.
According to Technical Writer HQ:
“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the average technical writer makes around $76,860 in the United States. According to their database, over 50,000 technical writer jobs exist in the US. The highest annual average salary for technical writers is in the computer science industry, followed by management, technical consulting, and employment services.”
Technical writing spans many industries but IT pays the most. Tech giants pay ~ $120,000 on average a year.
QA hat
Finding bugs in software is a byproduct of writing documentation. Ideally, tech writers are pulled into a project when it is an early phase. This phase formally called a minimal viable product (MVP) is bound to have bugs. tech writers become the first users by leveraging this software. Since MVPs have no documentation, writers start with a blank page and go systematically through each functionality of the software. As you can imagine, things quite often don’t work while using the MVP. So, tech writers are exposed to the first problems with usability.
When I got to work on my first MVPs, I had tons of questions. Through asking these questions, I discovered multiple bugs. I spent most of my time talking to and messaging engineers responsible for the component while leveraging their software. Repeatedly, this software was unusable until they fixed a bug I reported. As a junior, I mostly relied on verbose reporting, chat messages, and e-mails. However, I soon realized that these things get lost in the thicket of other information. So, I started using JIRA as a bug tracking system. It worked wonders since I plugged into software developers’ and managers’ daily tools of use.
Marketing hat
At times, tech writers get in the shoes of marketers and plug the product itself through writing e-books, newsletters, and all sorts of marketing slicks. Depending on where you work, it may be your adjacent role where you are tasked to collaborate with the marketing team or run your own little department.
The team with which I cut my teeth on tech writing and all things technical was in desperate need of hiring somebody who would take over writing a semi-business, semi-technical newsletter for the emerging technology we were creating. Since my job was to write, my manager figured I would also be capable of writing promotional material that would showcase what our team achieved every quarter. To my surprise, I played this role successfully and next thing I knew I was editing a highly technical e-book and rewriting my manager’s chapter.
Since documentation has bad PR and is considered to be boring, I believe it is tech writers’ job to try to turn things around and market for the necessity of good documentation despite its unsexiness.
User Experience hat
Sometimes tech writers get to conduct usability tests with users on the information architecture, the documentation website and collaborate with a UX researcher testing the usability of the user interface, and microcopy in the UI.
Those who have been interested in how people think and what makes them tick usually have the edge in this area over others. So, you could expect a technical writer to read dozens of books on human cognition, design thinking, and research methodology.
As a tech writer in the UX team, I collaborated with the UX researchers on finding the best information architecture for a new documentation project, I canvassed participants for the usability test and observed how these studies are conducted. I also provided feedback on user experience to front-end developers and UX designers.
Manager / Mentor hat
At some point in our career, we reach seniority that allows us to mentor other less experienced colleagues. Naturally, we become the go-to person when problems arise. Some tech writers become managers or documentation leads. Oftentimes, they first manage themselves since they are solely assigned to a single project. That’s when tech writers need to familiarize themselves with the product, the team, and establish the governance model for documentation.
There is no single paragon of the organizational structure to which tech writers are assigned to. In my first tech writing position, I used to belong to a pure software development team and my supervisor was a software engineering manager. In my second job, I was in a team of technical writers and my manager was a technical writer. So, the tech writing manager was responsible for global documentation in the company and designated tech writers to particular projects. All of them reported to that tech writing manager. In large companies, you may see a couple of tech writing managers who are responsible for particular business units. In yet another company, I was part of the UX team comprised of UX designers, UX researchers, front-end developers, and technical writers. Our manager was a UX researcher.
All of these additional roles, with the core of writing documentation, are not mutually exclusive. Tech writers may end up doing all of them to some degree, however, you would not be able to keep up with knowledge from each of the fields. Spreading yourself too thin is bound to yield negative results, that’s why most tech writers will be working at the intersection of 2 or 3 of these roles. However, exposure to all these roles can bring a novel and unique perspective on the product and its documentation.
Knowledge Management
Technical writers play a big part at Google and the company defines them as “a key link between engineers, marketing associates, developer advocates, as well as all the external users and developers, tying together many vital but disparate parts of the Google ecosystem.” (careers.google.com)
What Google states in their portrayal of tech writers is the information hub they create that reaches many touch points across the organization. When you think of documentation as the central depo of information, the information flow may look like this
Since technical writers operate at the intersection of these touch points, they are information mongers and information traffic controllers. Writing documentation is only a part of the big picture presented in the graph. Tech writers disseminate, connect, elicit, and manage information across many groups.
Why do I bring up this example? Because Google is a trend-setter and if documentation and technical writers yield such indisputably positive results in their organization, maybe it can work in yours, too.
Conclusion
To conclude, we should think of tech writers as generalists, one-man bands who bring unique perspectives from various fields to the product. Although, some tech writers tend to specialize in areas such as API docs, user experience, design. etc. Some become software developers creating doc tools, working on the front-end, administering Linux, or gravitate towards business analysis. I have yet to discover what path I will follow and specialize in. For now, I still feel an insatiable appetite for self-discovery. I hope I shone more light on the work tech writers perform and broke the stereotype of a tech writer whose job is to only write.
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