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

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.