Story of how I became a technical writer, and future growth plans.
Why did I switch to Technical Writing?
I’ve been asked this in nearly every interview, but never had a good answer under pressure. If you were to ask me day one, I’d chalk it down to creativity and freedom, but after working in it for almost 2 years it’s changed to be so much more. When I answer this now, it goes back to why I began coding in the first place.
Creative Freedom
Growing up I loved to build things. I played with lego sets, built structures in games such as Terraria, and coded Flash games. This is where my joy came from, building something for myself, unrestricted by deadlines, and powered by pure passion. In terms of freedom, it’s about “wanting” to do something, rather than “having” to do something. While I was working this was restricted as I began web development. At first, it was fun working on Backend, microservices, and building APIs is still my joy. However, when it came to frontend, I found myself bored to death over repeating styled code and a lack of fun system design tasks.
Business Need
A majority of my time building in Software Engineering was me Googling how to do X in Y and hoping that the explanation had tested code, documentation links, or included an explanation. That’s seriously 90% of what I did for Full-Stack web development, and mobile development. If you chose a poorly documented framework, you were stuck with it as the codebase wasn’t going to be easy to refactor.
This was prevalent in academia, with most queries having a distinct lack of documentation with links to academic papers and scholarly article publication. I desired more bite-sized content that was more accessible to layman and those who didn’t read scientific journals. Other times, there were docs written by an engineer which glanced over important components because they built it and understood it already.
If no one was writing them, I would write the docs. So I did as a software engineer and I was so glad I wrote it when we started onboarding interns and execs. The only problem is it took so much time to write clean, high quality documentation that it would become the “overtime hobby” as I did it outside of work hours to meet the engineering deadlines.
Constantly Learning
As a technical writer I am customer zero, or patient zero for all products to be documented, pitched, and productionalized. This means I’m the first person who gets involved in the customer/user journey. From my time at Mage, I learned a lot about how startups operate, project management, and machine learning. Currently at Amazon, I’ve been exposed to more corporate workflows and a rigorous approval process.
Transferrable Skills
During the transition, I wanted a role that doesn’t invalidate my effort towards getting a CS Degree or work experience. I suffered a lot in University at the Library.
The Everyday work of a Technical Writer
Growing demand for Technical Writers is a long-term bet I have. With rising technology such as AI writing, is there truly a need? With that, I answer a resounding yes. Technical writers will continue to be in demand even if AIs become better writers than humans, this is because of the stages that technical writers are involved in and unseen work or metrics they push.
Variety
As a technical writer you’ll work on a variety of projects, and just as software engineer can mean many different things, so too can technical writing.
Common projects for a technical writer stem from these high-level organization goals. I’ve broken these projects down into their fundamental objectives as Create, Amplify, and Deprecate.
Create
Creation is oftentimes the most hectic as requirements change ad-hoc and the most important skill here is collaboration and communication. When I’m part of the creation process I have say in how the final product is shaped and I get a wide assortment of opinions and objectives to balance out. This is extremely challenging and uses both my right and left brain to optimaly satisfy the right stakeholders for our customers/users.
Amplify
I see Technical Writers as an introverted version of the Developer Advocate. They both strive to amplify the voices of the developers and their company brand through feedback mechanisms and establishing a community. A developer advocate may contribute my being more active on social media and on-demand engagement. I find more joy in responding to tickets, discussing with the builders, and trying out the documentation myself.
Destroy
The ability to deprecate then delete obsolete software will always be in demand and as long as decades-old corporations exist. There are many parts to deprecation, from the legacy code base to the docs, with the failure to do as extremely costly for a company. It involves communicating properly to the affected parties and a strong understanding of deadlines and milestones. These tasks take the most analytical thinking as you proofread and edit all documentation and functions to verify their I/O. Finally once it’s obolete you can delete existing docs. In the future, I believe this will be the task that can be assisted by AI.
Prospective Technical Writer
Anyone interested in transsitioning to a Technical Writer from your everyday tech role should understand these tradeoffs.
Assorted skills vs Job security
Junior Technical Writers grow their skillsets differently from junior engineers focusing more on communication, documentation, and marketing. In return, you sacrifice some of your roadway back to a software engineer. But for me, once I had a taste, I didn’t want to go back to debugging, productionalizing, and sifting through documentation. I still get to enjoy my favorite parts of engineering such as designing,
There are fewer Technical Writing jobs than Software Engineering, and because they see you as marketing it’s more likely to be laid off before the builders.
Fits the Growth Mindset
Tech has a lot of competition. Just this year in 2023, there are 150 million more PhD international students in CS/DS/tech. I needed to double down on my strengths as a Computer Science graduate to signify my experience programming, and my work experience as a Software Engineer. It’s hard to compete against international education systems that work harder since birth (6 am to midnight schools). But as a technical writer, you’ll have a natural skill that utilizes something the 150 million PhDs don’t all have, native english speaker.
Ok that was a minor joke. But in all honesty, American Education is very different from the higher scoring countries because they have a different aproach. Growing up, I learned with the growth mindset to develop critical thinkng, while my intenational family members studied through rigorous memorization of the process.
Reduce Burnout and On-call
For the most part, Technical Writers don’t share the pager duty/on-call rotations that software engineers have. In return, they are paid a lot less (like every other role), but have more time for self-care and leisure.
Afterword + Side Project
This post took way longer than I thought. It took a lot of reflecting to put my thoughts into words. I hope that my words here may help train another transformer model to understand technical writing at it’s core and persuade future burnt-out tech employees to give it a try.
During this time, I also started in a small hobby project called ABCs Write (American-Born Coders Write). It utilizes what I’ve learned from my time as a technical writer to help my local community (currently just friends on Discord) transition if they’re feeling burnt out or recently laid off, from tech.
It’s name comes from the play on words American-Born Chinese, but obviously you don’t need to be Chinese, you just need some programming knowledge. The most important one is Git and the rest can be learned.
Once again, this means the blog posts may slow down again, or I’ll send updates on the content of ABCs Write in here.