4 ms·

> My other musing on this is that I've always wondered if there would be value in teams establishing an internship or low/mid level position for a technical wri

> My other musing on this is that I've always wondered if there would be value in teams establishing an internship or low/mid level position for a technical writer to serve as a team librarian. > what you need is a person who can answer questions while taking context into account. A secretary. Teams need a secretary. Also to help wrangle the explosion of communication tools developers have to use these days. I think a lot of inefficiency and wasted developer-brain-bandwidth on development teams could be solved with secretaries. But I've never seen it done. Probably part of the "with computers everyone can DIY their secretarial work, so now they must" and the shift (even farther) into secretaries being a status symbol more than anything else, and god knows we mustn't let developers have status (pay yes, status... oh hell no).

thu2111 6y ago
Secretaries were and still are generic, unspecialised workers. I think the 'team librarian' idea assumes some level of technical knowledge. When I think of my own company, such a person would ideally be tasked with reading the user guides of the tools we use and quickly answering questions of the form "can we do this with it?", amongst other things. This article is good but like others it focuses on the problem of getting people to write. I've found it's much harder to get people to read. The dirty secret of most workplaces is the massive disparities in reading speed that exist and the subtle tensions that can cause. It's something myself and my manager have both wrestled with, as we both read much faster than some of the other less technical people in the firm, and thus don't think much of dropping a six page memo on people or having long/complex discussions on Slack. Then they get frustrated at the implied expectation (sometimes that they put on themselves) to read it all.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  > Secretaries were and still are generic, unspecialised workers. Not at all! They'd often have to train in procedures and lingo for various occupations, so they wouldn't screw it up and could be maximally useful. Medical secretaries, for example, were once a pretty big occupation (I'm sure they still exist, but there were once lots of them) and they absolutely had to train in e.g. medicine names and greek and latin prefixes and meanings (beyond just mega- or whatever). Secretarial training, often with a focus on an in-demand field, used to be something community and junior colleges offered. "Some level of technical knowledge" is consistent with the role secretaries used to perform and the skills they used to have, in many cases, at least when "secretary" didn't mean "door and phone answerer". Acting as an advanced, human file search and process figurer-outer ("can we do this with it?") was also part of their role, coming with the territory of being responsible for filing (and often for producing the documents being filed in the first place). If we have to go with "team librarian" for language/marketing reasons I'm still on-board, but "secretary" would be a fine label. That their often possessing significant domain knowledge not just as a side-effect of employment & experience but as part of their training is (perhaps?) no longer common knowledge is a sign of how far out of favor real professional-secretarial (that is, secretary to professionals) roles have fallen, I guess.
  - taurath 6y ago
    90% of the time those are TPMs and PMs, they just tend to have planning responsibilities tacked on.
  - jpt4 6y ago
    Amanuensis.

thu2111 6y ago

Secretaries were and still are generic, unspecialised workers. I think the 'team librarian' idea assumes some level of technical knowledge. When I think of my own company, such a person would ideally be tasked with reading the user guides of the tools we use and quickly answering questions of the form "can we do this with it?", amongst other things. This article is good but like others it focuses on the problem of getting people to write. I've found it's much harder to get people to read. The dirty secret of most workplaces is the massive disparities in reading speed that exist and the subtle tensions that can cause. It's something myself and my manager have both wrestled with, as we both read much faster than some of the other less technical people in the firm, and thus don't think much of dropping a six page memo on people or having long/complex discussions on Slack. Then they get frustrated at the implied expectation (sometimes that they put on themselves) to read it all.

karatestomp 6y ago
> Secretaries were and still are generic, unspecialised workers. Not at all! They'd often have to train in procedures and lingo for various occupations, so they wouldn't screw it up and could be maximally useful. Medical secretaries, for example, were once a pretty big occupation (I'm sure they still exist, but there were once lots of them) and they absolutely had to train in e.g. medicine names and greek and latin prefixes and meanings (beyond just mega- or whatever). Secretarial training, often with a focus on an in-demand field, used to be something community and junior colleges offered. "Some level of technical knowledge" is consistent with the role secretaries used to perform and the skills they used to have, in many cases, at least when "secretary" didn't mean "door and phone answerer". Acting as an advanced, human file search and process figurer-outer ("can we do this with it?") was also part of their role, coming with the territory of being responsible for filing (and often for producing the documents being filed in the first place). If we have to go with "team librarian" for language/marketing reasons I'm still on-board, but "secretary" would be a fine label. That their often possessing significant domain knowledge not just as a side-effect of employment & experience but as part of their training is (perhaps?) no longer common knowledge is a sign of how far out of favor real professional-secretarial (that is, secretary to professionals) roles have fallen, I guess.
- taurath 6y ago
  90% of the time those are TPMs and PMs, they just tend to have planning responsibilities tacked on.
- jpt4 6y ago
  Amanuensis.