Programmers

The majority of developers and their managers have absolutely no idea what technical writers do. Most developers think of us as old-school secretaries (administrative assistants) who correct their typographical errors and handle their typing. If you are a developer who knows better, please educate your peers rather than sending me a note with the message “not all developers.”

Developers frequently work with time pressure. They have limited time to code and debug a feature. Why should technical writers not have the same stresses?

I spend most of my time at work thinking about the product users. Those are the people who will be reading what I wrote. That means I spend a lot of time considering what each person might not know, and might not know they don’t know. Part of the job of a technical writer is helping people learn. Which puts me in a very different head space than a lot of the people I work with.

During the course of a career lasting over 20 years, would you care to guess how many times I have been given data from a software developer that later turned out not to be correct?

A maximum of three.

Once, another developer informed me that something I had written wasn’t true. I provided the developer with a copy of the e-mail in which a different developer had said it was true. (No, I didn’t rat out the original developer by providing their name.) The developer demonstrated to me that it could not possibly be true. So I changed the docs.