Scheduling

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?

Development can be incredibly self-focussed. Development managers and developers share information with members of the development team, and can be positively stunned to learn that not everyone outside the team has access.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when development is complete.

• There is a belief that the development deadline is available to technical writers, and in my experience, it is not available more than 50% of the time.
• There is a stronger belief that the availability of a feature to product users is known to everyone once development is complete. That has enormous impact on technical writers because:
  • Technical writers sometimes must wait for confirmation that the product’s functionality is available before taking the step that makes documentation visible to customers.
  • Technical writers sometimes do not have access to the product that users do, and cannot check whether the functionality has been made available.

I sympathize with you if you want to believe, “Well, those are just companies that communicate poorly.” That may be so. But they are still the vast majority of companies, and I lose sympathy with you if you want to argue that they are a minority.