4 ms·

I also disagree with the author. The first careers I witnessed being negatively impacted by AI coming onto the scene .. just a couple years ago .. was tech wri

by ncr100 1mo ago

I also disagree with the author. The first careers I witnessed being negatively impacted by AI coming onto the scene .. just a couple years ago .. was tech writers. Source: my personal network of tech writer colleagues.

kranner 1mo ago
Have seen the same thing happen to literary translator friends. Barring the very rare few who broke through to international fame via well-known literary award, the rest were largely sustaining themselves with more mundane business translations and that work is ended.
- ProllyInfamous 1mo ago
  My father knows a guy that financed a Texas mansion, for $2MM, using the collateral from his decade of running a very large technical document translation service (US resident, using foreign workforce from his homeland), popular throughout the 2010s. Was a beautiful house, which I briefly lived in during scatterbrained renovations (never met the new owner). The bank forclosed on his house ~late2024/early2025... anybody can now just use an LLM to translate (in real time), on sub-$300 hardware (offline, open-source models run via e.g: Whisper[GUI]).
hcknwscommenter 1mo ago
tech writers disrupted by AI a couple of years ago? Seems very dubious. A couple of years ago, AI was terrible at writing anything.
- weeu 1mo ago
  [dead]
passwordoops 1mo ago
Yeah not seeing it for technical writing. Especially in industries with even a hint of regulatory compliance, the imprecision is too significant. It's not for lack of trying or wishful thinking. Either your colleagues are facing stiffer competition off-shore (not LLM driven) or their jobs were more about organizing, checking and sorting topics and data (LLMs can take that away)
- alexjameson 1mo ago
  As a tech writer myself, I often hear from other tech writers around the world that they find themselves as editors for llm-written slop. The main problem is that even before llns, almost no senior manager understood what the TWs actually do. As a result, there is a strong desire to get rid of the editor team.(see the case of Snowflake when a team of 70 documentarians was let go in a single day). The company I work for also encourages us to use agents as much as possible. Now, I spend more time in the terminal than in VS Code. However, the situation is different for those who work in regulated areas.

by ncr100 1mo ago

kranner 1mo ago

Have seen the same thing happen to literary translator friends. Barring the very rare few who broke through to international fame via well-known literary award, the rest were largely sustaining themselves with more mundane business translations and that work is ended.

ProllyInfamous 1mo ago
My father knows a guy that financed a Texas mansion, for $2MM, using the collateral from his decade of running a very large technical document translation service (US resident, using foreign workforce from his homeland), popular throughout the 2010s. Was a beautiful house, which I briefly lived in during scatterbrained renovations (never met the new owner). The bank forclosed on his house ~late2024/early2025... anybody can now just use an LLM to translate (in real time), on sub-$300 hardware (offline, open-source models run via e.g: Whisper[GUI]).

hcknwscommenter 1mo ago

tech writers disrupted by AI a couple of years ago? Seems very dubious. A couple of years ago, AI was terrible at writing anything.

weeu 1mo ago
[dead]

passwordoops 1mo ago

Yeah not seeing it for technical writing. Especially in industries with even a hint of regulatory compliance, the imprecision is too significant. It's not for lack of trying or wishful thinking. Either your colleagues are facing stiffer competition off-shore (not LLM driven) or their jobs were more about organizing, checking and sorting topics and data (LLMs can take that away)

alexjameson 1mo ago
As a tech writer myself, I often hear from other tech writers around the world that they find themselves as editors for llm-written slop. The main problem is that even before llns, almost no senior manager understood what the TWs actually do. As a result, there is a strong desire to get rid of the editor team.(see the case of Snowflake when a team of 70 documentarians was let go in a single day). The company I work for also encourages us to use agents as much as possible. Now, I spend more time in the terminal than in VS Code. However, the situation is different for those who work in regulated areas.