Re: "Surviving the Dying Career of Technical Writing"

["William Sherman" <bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com>]

These two hit it, I think.  One thing I have hit on for years is that 
TECHNICAL writers have become less and less technical over the years. They 
have stressed more the tools and how to use them than the knowledge of the 
subject you are supposed to explain to others.

You may be the best at handling a saw and knowing how to hammer nails, but 
if you have no idea how to frame a door, plum a wall, or a host of other 
things, I'm not going to pay you to be a carpenter.

If you are going to be a glorified secretary, I sure am not going to pay you 
$40, $50, or more an hour to write manuals. I'll hire a couple of people at 
$10 an hour who can use Microsoft Word who want to escape WalMart.

Where I am, we are doing this massive conversion to a CMS and everything 
needs to go to XML globally. So they contracted some place in Asia who will 
rewrite all the FrameMaker files into XML and put everything in our "new" 
global standard template. This was to coincide with the release of our 
newest prototype. It has been over a year and the first two book lines 
(Maintenance, Operator, Parts, and Service) for our old prototype and our 
new prototype, which are quite similar, but vary vastly in size and 
capability, have yet to produce one single book that is usable.

They are showing more and more a lack of technical understanding of the 
products, and so the books are reflecting this lack of understanding what is 
important to the customer. There is more focus on the formatting than the 
content.

And they had the content. It existed in the old manuals for the first 
prototype. It just needed to be converted. Instead, they rewrote it to fit 
the "new" global style without seeing they are tearing up the meaning.

Twelve years ago at Cisco, we had partnered with a group in India to offload 
some of our manuals. Most didn't see this as training someone to do our jobs 
cheaper. But what happened was that we ended it after production costs 
nearly tripled since the rework was much more, the delays were more, the 
number of people having to get involved were more, and it just wasn't 
working. Less than a year later, most in our LOB were gone and the work was 
sent to India. (And you wonder why Cisco stock sits were it does.)

I guess after ten years, those in India are having issues now.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>
To: "Lauren" <lauren -at- writeco -dot- net>; <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2016 6:57 PM
Subject: Re: "Surviving the Dying Career of Technical Writing"