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Thank you for the solid advice. That was basically how I got into writing/editing as a field originally so it's good to know similar principles might apply here

by spats1990 7y ago

Thank you for the solid advice. That was basically how I got into writing/editing as a field originally so it's good to know similar principles might apply here. An upside is that tech/engineering people (especially those involved with OSS) seem generally pretty friendly and willing to explain stuff, etc--provided that, as you said, they don't feel their time is being wasted.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
The "selling" part here is convincing people that writing really matters. And you need to do it in a way that comes across as "You have a cool thing that is doing good stuff and I would like to make it betterer." You need to not make people feel insulted, which can be tricky. I think that's the biggest thing I wrestle with is convincing people I have something of value to offer without sounding like "You suck!" It's really tricky when it's knowledge work. The other thing about writing technical documentation is you have to understand the tech some to talk about it. I occasionally do resume work and I mostly do that for experienced tech people who probably know me through HN in most cases. I can edit their resumes even though I'm not a serious programmer because I have some idea what the hell they do for a living. This is a really big thing for the tech world. Communicating well means you first need to understand the topic and the tech world routinely beats its head against a wall because managers and salespeople and so forth don't actually understand the tech well enough to be genuinely effective. It leads to lots of "They did this stupid thing because they honestly have no idea what the tech actually does." This seems to be a factor in some of the debacles where some startup company has stuck "AI" in the name, absolutely can't deliver on that promise and they are getting sued because of it. A lot of "tech" solutions are like that scene in Men in Black 2 where they open the mail sorting machine and inside is a guy with many arms flinging mail as fast as he can. Many non-technical people honestly don't know the difference between a box of people and an actual machine-based solution. If you are crowd sourcing work from many remote workers and getting results on a website, they just see the website and go "Well, neat! Computers are amazing!" So be prepared for writing technical documentation to be hard at first and involve a lot of research. But if you get good at it, you might find that people will seek you out because a lot of writers simply aren't qualified to communicate on the subject. They don't have the background knowledge.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

The "selling" part here is convincing people that writing really matters. And you need to do it in a way that comes across as "You have a cool thing that is doing good stuff and I would like to make it betterer." You need to not make people feel insulted, which can be tricky. I think that's the biggest thing I wrestle with is convincing people I have something of value to offer without sounding like "You suck!" It's really tricky when it's knowledge work. The other thing about writing technical documentation is you have to understand the tech some to talk about it. I occasionally do resume work and I mostly do that for experienced tech people who probably know me through HN in most cases. I can edit their resumes even though I'm not a serious programmer because I have some idea what the hell they do for a living. This is a really big thing for the tech world. Communicating well means you first need to understand the topic and the tech world routinely beats its head against a wall because managers and salespeople and so forth don't actually understand the tech well enough to be genuinely effective. It leads to lots of "They did this stupid thing because they honestly have no idea what the tech actually does." This seems to be a factor in some of the debacles where some startup company has stuck "AI" in the name, absolutely can't deliver on that promise and they are getting sued because of it. A lot of "tech" solutions are like that scene in Men in Black 2 where they open the mail sorting machine and inside is a guy with many arms flinging mail as fast as he can. Many non-technical people honestly don't know the difference between a box of people and an actual machine-based solution. If you are crowd sourcing work from many remote workers and getting results on a website, they just see the website and go "Well, neat! Computers are amazing!" So be prepared for writing technical documentation to be hard at first and involve a lot of research. But if you get good at it, you might find that people will seek you out because a lot of writers simply aren't qualified to communicate on the subject. They don't have the background knowledge.