I used to be on good terms with a technical writer from a company I worked for some time ago. He later became one of the very few people who were let go as a r

I used to be on good terms with a technical writer from a company I worked for some time ago. He later became one of the very few people who were let go as a result of a merger. Also, from what I can tell, technical writer isn't a cushy job, not anywhere near even entry-level programming jobs. Also, it's usually at companies with existing and large user-base, relatively large companies... there's not a lot of jobs on the market. I mean, I have a feeling that if a company asked a technical writer to learn LaTeX, they would probably do it, even on their own time. It's a tough market, and learning LaTeX enough to produce something isn't a huge effort (also, there are a bunch of tools that prepare the boilerplate code for documents). But I can see how sales people might not have been impressed by such prospects.