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I've never understood writing as a specialization without any subject matter knowledge. For example Journalism degrees are often the first step in becoming a wr

I've never understood writing as a specialization without any subject matter knowledge. For example Journalism degrees are often the first step in becoming a writer for a newspaper. The journalist ends up in the 'business' or 'politics' team even with no experience in these fields. My naive suggestion for improvement would be to develop technical writing skills in addition to another degree or field. Want to write about science? Then do a science degree as well as a writing course. Same with documenting software. Isn't it better to have knowledge about software when writing documentation? I'm not talking advanced CS here, I mean basics. I think the article supports my view. The author hit a limit at his workplace because he specialised in writing without a deeper knowledge of what he was writing about. Instead of gaining that knowlege prior to working he had to learn on the job, which is fine but not ideal if it's not necessary.

WalterBright 4y ago
Journalists writing well but ignorantly about a topic is the result, and commonplace.
- trashtester 4y ago
  Not only is this depressing, but it can lead to dangerous misinformation.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Every time I've seen a journalist report on a topic that I have in-depth knowledge of, the article was misleading and usually flat out wrong. This is even when the journalist has no bias. When the journalist does have a bias, it's just worse. Over time this has made me suspicious of all reporting by journalists. The reporting on the 737MAX is a stellar example of this. The only reasonably accurate reporting I've seen on it is by Aviation Week.
teeray 4y ago
> Isn't it better to have knowledge about software when writing documentation? I'm not talking advanced CS here, I mean basics. I would say that’s probably about as much as you would want. The best technical writer I ever worked with went from basic computer skills to becoming an expert at deploying and configuring the database software we developed on myriad infrastructure. The newcomer’s mindset helped make the writing wonderfully approachable for anyone to read. The process was always something like: 1) Learn how to do the thing, but ask really good questions along the way (I often reconsidered some of my own design choices from those questions) 2) Use the gathered information to write about doing the thing.
- huachimingo 4y ago
  This is like when kids start to ask "stupid" questions, when in reality those are sometimes useful data coming from another paradigm.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    I'd say that when a question from a child is called "stupid", it's more likely that the grown-up is the stupid one. Children can ask hard questions sometimes, and grown-ups can get embarrassed when they don't know the answer. Instead of admitting their limitations, many adults will call the question "stupid" or the euphemisms "funny" or "strange", indicating that the child should not ask such difficult questions.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  Sounds like a paradox of competence.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    Well, there's more than one relevant sense of "competence". Competence in the sense of acquired skills can be harmful to (introductory) tech writing, because experts pay attention to different things than beginners do. Competence in the sense of intelligence is helpful, and was called for explicitly in your parent comment: >> ask really good questions along the way
xmprt 4y ago
As a programmer with a CS degree who has also dabbled in writing, I can tell that writing well is a lot harder than programming. A good writer can ask the right questions and present them in a way that their target audience can understand. That's the whole point of specialization - programmers should program and journalists should journal. Completing a science degree would be extremely time consuming and wasteful if your goal is to help with science communication. I think the problem with a lot of technical journalism right now isn't because journalists are lazy or not smart enough to do the research or understand the science. It's because of the insane publishing requirements put on them which leads to subpar quality. Encouraging they get an extra degree won't help fix that.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  > As a programmer with a CS degree who has also dabbled in writing, I can tell that writing well is a lot harder than programming. As an award winning writer with a day job in programming writing bad code is easier than writing bad prose. Most people have been exposed to enough good writing to know it when they see it even if they don't appreciate it. Most programmers have never seen good code. The only person to consistently aim for well written code is Knuth: https://wiki.c2.com/?TexTheProgram https://wiki.c2.com/?TexTheProgram That he needed to invent a whole new ecosystem to do that in should tell you how far away the average programmer is from getting there.
  - krisoft 4y ago
    > The only person to consistently aim for well written code is Knuth That is a ridiculous statement. Are you really saying that from all the developers all over the world you believe that he is the only one who consistently aims for well written code? How would you even start ascertaining the truthfullness of this? Have you went around, interviewed all the developers and found their ”aim for well written code” to be lacking in consistency? > That he needed to invent a whole new ecosystem to do that in should tell you how far away the average programmer is from getting there. That he thought he needed to invent a new ecosystem tells you much about him, yes. It absolutely does not tell you about the aims of others. Perhaps others found that they can write well writen code consistently even without inventing a new ecosystem.
jollybean 4y ago
Technical Writing is very different than other forms of writing. Journalism is 'real world research' - the end result is some writing. Technical Writing is usually mostly just the end result part. Journalists 'research', technical writers 'form the right phrases'. It definitely helps to have domain knowledge but you don't need a degree in anything. Someone to write comprehensive docs - that's another story. You almost want an Engineer who is a 'good explainer', and then finished off by the technical writer who can clean it all up and help edit.
CodeBeater 4y ago
Whilst I disagree with getting a whole degree in order to have some authority in the field, I wholeheartedly agree with the message. I remember a section of the book "The Art of Thinking Clearly" by Frank Dobelli dedicated specifically on that subject. I don't remember the exact quote, but it is something along the lines of: "We cannot forget that news anchors are nothing more than perfectly coiffed teleprompter readers". One example that the author brought in the book was how these same TV anchors/news readers types often are invited to moderate debates on subjects they have absolutely no knowledge of.
GeneralMayhem 4y ago
You could say the same thing about software development... how is it reasonable for engineers to have opinions about specific business/subject-matter requirements, when all we've studied in detail is CS? Want to write quantitative trading software? Get a degree in economics and take a couple coding courses. Want to write an ad platform? Get a degree in marketing, with a minor in auction theory. Everything in industry - and, increasingly, academia - is interdisciplinary. Given finite time to study, you're going to have to learn one "side" of the job on the job.
- trashtester 4y ago
  > Given finite time to study, you're going to have to learn one "side" of the job on the job. Way too many programmers focus only on the coding part. I ABSOLUTELY think programmers in general should try to learn the subject-matters they work with much better than they do. Someone who has above-average competency in programming AND for a business domain, may end up more useful than someone who is within the 20% best programmers, but who relies on having all requirements provided in perfect detail. Getting to this point from a MSc in CS or a similar field does require some effort. Maybe you can learn some of that on the job or maybe you can attend some courses or other training, or maybe you learn from reading some books in your spare time. Some things are hard to go back to after you leave college, though, and I think in particular Math is something it pays to pick up early. And with some more math/stats early on, it often becomes easier to pick up the more technical parts of many applied fields (such as data science, marketing, economics, engineering, etc).
  - hardware2win 4y ago
    Yes, companies would want domain experts with good coding skills Basically somebody who "solves company's various problems while using computers to do so"
    - trashtester 4y ago
      Exactly. Even jobs that could be done in earlier times with just pen and paper, tend to require something similar to software to do effiently now. A domain expert that has even BASIC coding skills can actually by much more useful than one who has none at all, if there exist programming-like environments that enable them to make use of such skills. Let's say you have two experts in some business domain, and they need to provide input to some data pipeline process. If one of them can express their input in a format that can actually do the computation needed, let's say in Jupyter or in an ETL tool like Pentaho, you can find ways to operationalize that with low latency using only 1-2 developers even for a large number of such experts. If the other will only produce requirements in Confluence or Office, and the developers need to decode these requirements and turn them into working code, there are a lot more ways things can go wrong. Often, this requires multiple iterations to iron misunderstandings. This workflow can easily add a need for one extra developer PER domain expert to do the same job, and also take longer to get into production. In other words, the value generated by the first expert may easily be the same as that of from second expert PLUS the value from one developer, or even more when taking into account that more employees need more managers, more meetings, etc. Now, what sometimes happens in organizations, is that the first domain expert is not recognized as a super-valuable domain expert, but is instead treated as a below average developer. They may even have such a title, even if in many cases (at least in my experience) their education may be something like economics or marketing, or they may be self-taught. But when that person leaves, the organization first fills up the role with a new dev, but quickly hits the wall because there are nobody left that understands the business side. And as the new junior employee spends all of their energy to understand the modern tech stack that most of the Cool Devs are using, managment discovers that the second domain expert suddenly is a bottleneck, while the productivity of the organization has gone down by half or more.
btilly 4y ago
I believe that the author mistook "able to write interesting stuff" with "good at technical writing". I mean the blog was a kinda fun read. But it demonstrated none of the expository skills that I'd want for documentation.
analog31 4y ago
At some point it becomes a matter of who's available for what, and for what pay. Newspaper jobs and journalism degrees are a match in terms of availability and pay. Likewise programming jobs and CS degrees. If someone gets past the "hump" of learning a lucrative technical field, it's going to be hard to hold them back from going further to the point where they're capable of working in that field. There's probably (haven't ever checked the numbers) a situation where it's cheaper to pay a technical writer to write documentation than to have a programmer do it. For that matter there are engineers who are "secretaries for engineers" in the sense that a junior engineer or designer does work for cheaper than what it would cost for a senior engineer to do it. A lot of engineering is like the proverbial iceberg, where 85% of the work is invisible and doesn't need extensive domain knowledge, such as detailing drawings after a senior engineer has done the hard quantitative engineering. I'm one of the domain experts at my workplace, and I do get asked questions related to my expertise, but it doesn't happen all that often. I got a science degree at a liberal arts college, meaning that I learned enough to do decent technical writing. But going into science writing would have meant a sacrifice in terms of pay and probably job security.

WalterBright 4y ago

Journalists writing well but ignorantly about a topic is the result, and commonplace.

trashtester 4y ago
Not only is this depressing, but it can lead to dangerous misinformation.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Every time I've seen a journalist report on a topic that I have in-depth knowledge of, the article was misleading and usually flat out wrong. This is even when the journalist has no bias. When the journalist does have a bias, it's just worse. Over time this has made me suspicious of all reporting by journalists. The reporting on the 737MAX is a stellar example of this. The only reasonably accurate reporting I've seen on it is by Aviation Week.

teeray 4y ago

> Isn't it better to have knowledge about software when writing documentation? I'm not talking advanced CS here, I mean basics. I would say that’s probably about as much as you would want. The best technical writer I ever worked with went from basic computer skills to becoming an expert at deploying and configuring the database software we developed on myriad infrastructure. The newcomer’s mindset helped make the writing wonderfully approachable for anyone to read. The process was always something like: 1) Learn how to do the thing, but ask really good questions along the way (I often reconsidered some of my own design choices from those questions) 2) Use the gathered information to write about doing the thing.

huachimingo 4y ago
This is like when kids start to ask "stupid" questions, when in reality those are sometimes useful data coming from another paradigm.
- trashtester 4y ago
  I'd say that when a question from a child is called "stupid", it's more likely that the grown-up is the stupid one. Children can ask hard questions sometimes, and grown-ups can get embarrassed when they don't know the answer. Instead of admitting their limitations, many adults will call the question "stupid" or the euphemisms "funny" or "strange", indicating that the child should not ask such difficult questions.
bcrosby95 4y ago
Sounds like a paradox of competence.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Well, there's more than one relevant sense of "competence". Competence in the sense of acquired skills can be harmful to (introductory) tech writing, because experts pay attention to different things than beginners do. Competence in the sense of intelligence is helpful, and was called for explicitly in your parent comment: >> ask really good questions along the way

xmprt 4y ago

As a programmer with a CS degree who has also dabbled in writing, I can tell that writing well is a lot harder than programming. A good writer can ask the right questions and present them in a way that their target audience can understand. That's the whole point of specialization - programmers should program and journalists should journal. Completing a science degree would be extremely time consuming and wasteful if your goal is to help with science communication. I think the problem with a lot of technical journalism right now isn't because journalists are lazy or not smart enough to do the research or understand the science. It's because of the insane publishing requirements put on them which leads to subpar quality. Encouraging they get an extra degree won't help fix that.

thrown_22 4y ago
> As a programmer with a CS degree who has also dabbled in writing, I can tell that writing well is a lot harder than programming. As an award winning writer with a day job in programming writing bad code is easier than writing bad prose. Most people have been exposed to enough good writing to know it when they see it even if they don't appreciate it. Most programmers have never seen good code. The only person to consistently aim for well written code is Knuth: https://wiki.c2.com/?TexTheProgram https://wiki.c2.com/?TexTheProgram That he needed to invent a whole new ecosystem to do that in should tell you how far away the average programmer is from getting there.
- krisoft 4y ago
  > The only person to consistently aim for well written code is Knuth That is a ridiculous statement. Are you really saying that from all the developers all over the world you believe that he is the only one who consistently aims for well written code? How would you even start ascertaining the truthfullness of this? Have you went around, interviewed all the developers and found their ”aim for well written code” to be lacking in consistency? > That he needed to invent a whole new ecosystem to do that in should tell you how far away the average programmer is from getting there. That he thought he needed to invent a new ecosystem tells you much about him, yes. It absolutely does not tell you about the aims of others. Perhaps others found that they can write well writen code consistently even without inventing a new ecosystem.

jollybean 4y ago

Technical Writing is very different than other forms of writing. Journalism is 'real world research' - the end result is some writing. Technical Writing is usually mostly just the end result part. Journalists 'research', technical writers 'form the right phrases'. It definitely helps to have domain knowledge but you don't need a degree in anything. Someone to write comprehensive docs - that's another story. You almost want an Engineer who is a 'good explainer', and then finished off by the technical writer who can clean it all up and help edit.

CodeBeater 4y ago

Whilst I disagree with getting a whole degree in order to have some authority in the field, I wholeheartedly agree with the message. I remember a section of the book "The Art of Thinking Clearly" by Frank Dobelli dedicated specifically on that subject. I don't remember the exact quote, but it is something along the lines of: "We cannot forget that news anchors are nothing more than perfectly coiffed teleprompter readers". One example that the author brought in the book was how these same TV anchors/news readers types often are invited to moderate debates on subjects they have absolutely no knowledge of.

GeneralMayhem 4y ago

You could say the same thing about software development... how is it reasonable for engineers to have opinions about specific business/subject-matter requirements, when all we've studied in detail is CS? Want to write quantitative trading software? Get a degree in economics and take a couple coding courses. Want to write an ad platform? Get a degree in marketing, with a minor in auction theory. Everything in industry - and, increasingly, academia - is interdisciplinary. Given finite time to study, you're going to have to learn one "side" of the job on the job.

trashtester 4y ago
> Given finite time to study, you're going to have to learn one "side" of the job on the job. Way too many programmers focus only on the coding part. I ABSOLUTELY think programmers in general should try to learn the subject-matters they work with much better than they do. Someone who has above-average competency in programming AND for a business domain, may end up more useful than someone who is within the 20% best programmers, but who relies on having all requirements provided in perfect detail. Getting to this point from a MSc in CS or a similar field does require some effort. Maybe you can learn some of that on the job or maybe you can attend some courses or other training, or maybe you learn from reading some books in your spare time. Some things are hard to go back to after you leave college, though, and I think in particular Math is something it pays to pick up early. And with some more math/stats early on, it often becomes easier to pick up the more technical parts of many applied fields (such as data science, marketing, economics, engineering, etc).
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Yes, companies would want domain experts with good coding skills Basically somebody who "solves company's various problems while using computers to do so"
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Exactly. Even jobs that could be done in earlier times with just pen and paper, tend to require something similar to software to do effiently now. A domain expert that has even BASIC coding skills can actually by much more useful than one who has none at all, if there exist programming-like environments that enable them to make use of such skills. Let's say you have two experts in some business domain, and they need to provide input to some data pipeline process. If one of them can express their input in a format that can actually do the computation needed, let's say in Jupyter or in an ETL tool like Pentaho, you can find ways to operationalize that with low latency using only 1-2 developers even for a large number of such experts. If the other will only produce requirements in Confluence or Office, and the developers need to decode these requirements and turn them into working code, there are a lot more ways things can go wrong. Often, this requires multiple iterations to iron misunderstandings. This workflow can easily add a need for one extra developer PER domain expert to do the same job, and also take longer to get into production. In other words, the value generated by the first expert may easily be the same as that of from second expert PLUS the value from one developer, or even more when taking into account that more employees need more managers, more meetings, etc. Now, what sometimes happens in organizations, is that the first domain expert is not recognized as a super-valuable domain expert, but is instead treated as a below average developer. They may even have such a title, even if in many cases (at least in my experience) their education may be something like economics or marketing, or they may be self-taught. But when that person leaves, the organization first fills up the role with a new dev, but quickly hits the wall because there are nobody left that understands the business side. And as the new junior employee spends all of their energy to understand the modern tech stack that most of the Cool Devs are using, managment discovers that the second domain expert suddenly is a bottleneck, while the productivity of the organization has gone down by half or more.

btilly 4y ago

I believe that the author mistook "able to write interesting stuff" with "good at technical writing". I mean the blog was a kinda fun read. But it demonstrated none of the expository skills that I'd want for documentation.

analog31 4y ago

At some point it becomes a matter of who's available for what, and for what pay. Newspaper jobs and journalism degrees are a match in terms of availability and pay. Likewise programming jobs and CS degrees. If someone gets past the "hump" of learning a lucrative technical field, it's going to be hard to hold them back from going further to the point where they're capable of working in that field. There's probably (haven't ever checked the numbers) a situation where it's cheaper to pay a technical writer to write documentation than to have a programmer do it. For that matter there are engineers who are "secretaries for engineers" in the sense that a junior engineer or designer does work for cheaper than what it would cost for a senior engineer to do it. A lot of engineering is like the proverbial iceberg, where 85% of the work is invisible and doesn't need extensive domain knowledge, such as detailing drawings after a senior engineer has done the hard quantitative engineering. I'm one of the domain experts at my workplace, and I do get asked questions related to my expertise, but it doesn't happen all that often. I got a science degree at a liberal arts college, meaning that I learned enough to do decent technical writing. But going into science writing would have meant a sacrifice in terms of pay and probably job security.