Two decades in the life-a writer's ramblings

by Anne Halsey

Recently I put on my musing hat to think of anything to say in the newsletter that others might want to read.

Couldn't come up with a blasted thing. "You'd think," I thought, "that with 20 years under my belt I'd be able to write an article on something related to tech writing." And thus, an idea was born.

Here is my take on two decades in tech comm: tools, trends, technologies, respect (or the lack thereof), and where this roller-coaster ride might take us next.

Imagine hand-written markups and document updates

I back-doored into tech writing back when you could still do that. I was a year out of college with a shiny Journalism degree and an English minor. The monthly magazine I worked for had gone bust and I was looking for any writing job at all that would earn a decent wage. This was Omaha in 1983-my magazine job paid $10k per year, no benefits-so I wasn't about to be picky.

After a couple weeks of looking, I saw an ad in the local daily for a "user documentation writer/analyst." I understood the "writer" part and the "documentation" part, so I applied. I got the job-junior member of a two-member writing team at a high-tech company. My writing partner and I documented everything about a cable television customer processing software set. Between us, we maintained a multi-thousand page user guide (when printed double-sided it filled three 3-inch binders) and some ancillary docs. But get this: we wrote out all the documentation and updates longhand, using felt-tip pens (does anyone remember Flairs?) and legal pads. We turned these scribblings over to a team of word-processors who keyed our stuff into a Wang system.

As I'm sure you can imagine, the doc cycles took forever. Hand-written edits to existing printouts weren't bad, but handwriting documentation for a new feature, screen, or report ... that was brutal. Then you had to review what came back from the Wangettes (yes, that's what we called them) twice-once to make sure they'd gotten what you provided, and then a second time to make sure no errors had been introduced.

Deadline weeks found me with a bowl of ice water on my desk to soak my writing hand when the cramps got bad. I swear that it took a decade for the callousy-lump on my index finger to go away.

I remember spending late nights and weekends working with my writing partner on a proposal to management in support of giving us documentation writers typewriters. We called for "writer-controlled word processing." The proposal was rejected.

Onward and upward: to Denver, and writing on a computer

When we moved to Denver a year or so later, I knew tech writing was my career. I was thrilled to land a job documenting land and facilities mapping software, and at a significantly higher salary than I'd asked for. And I had my own desktop computer! Well, okay, a VT-100 dumb terminal hung off a mainframe, but still! And I learned my first word-processing program-something called CEO, which stood for Corporate Executive Office-in record time.

Not all was a step forward, however. In Omaha, the writing teams had been considered part of development, and on the professional track. Never was I asked to take meeting minutes or handle anything resembling admin/support tasks. Training was available, and we were encouraged to take advantage of both technical and "personal growth" education opportunities. The company even paid for STC memberships.

In Denver, life was different. In each of my subsequent positions (spanning the next 12 years) I was asked under the "other duties as assigned" umbrella to perform various support tasks: take meeting minutes, arrange for conference rooms, print name badges, and even label, weigh, and meter outgoing mail. It was only after I completed an MS in Technical Communication that I began to be accorded some of the respect that I took for granted back in the good old Omaha days.

So, what about the tools?

In 20 years of doing this for a living, I've mastered text-formatting tools such as felt-tip pens and legal pads, CEO, DSR (DEC's answer to nroff/troff/xroff), and OfficeWriter. From there, I migrated through word-processors like Word and WordPerfect. And from there, to desktop publishing tools and design packages like Interleaf, Quark Express, and FrameMaker.

Frame is worth a little sidebar. How many of you remember when Frame was actually two products: FrameMaker and BookMaker? You did your authoring in FrameMaker, including setting index markers. But you had to exit FrameMaker and run BookMaker to actually code and generate a table of contents and generate an index. This was before Frame had the nifty building-blocks feature ... you actually had to type the code for the format you wanted. I think it took me about six hours to code the format for my first TOC. For the past 10 years or so (other than a nasty Word interlude), I've been able to run Frame or Interleaf in either a PC or UNIX environment.

What you should take from this is simple: the tools will continue to evolve. To be successful, you'd better learn to evolve as well.

A quick note for the tool bigots

As an aside, I frequently see writers girding their loins for the "tool wars." And bemoaning the employers that require experience with certain tools. You know the ones I mean — the "if I can't use Frame I won't do the job" types. Get real.

Once you've learned one or two of the tools, you can learn just about anything. And I certainly have tools that I prefer when given the choice. But the reality is that them as has the jobs and the cash set the rules. Especially in economies like we're facing now, if the employer wants his 1000-page tome written and maintained in Word, so be it.

Our job is to educate employers about the consequences of that decision-the costs to schedules, quality, and maintainability. Then gracefully accommodate the decisions that are made. Face it ... if you don't want the job, someone else does.

The scope of the work has changed a lot

So — is the job the same as it was in 1983? Yes and no.

The "what has to be done" is certainly the same. Creating that wonderful fiction called a "first draft" when no one has yet decided what the product does or who it does it for. Prying specs out of the unwilling. Trying to get time with SMEs who are over-committed and under the gun. Getting your hands on early versions of whatever it is you're documenting and figuring out how the thing works — regardless of what the product or service might be. Getting and incorporating reviewer feedback. Making the complex seem simple, the poorly-designed seem intuitive, and the obtuse seem clear.

What has changed is what we deliver. In the before-time, you delivered a book, maybe a quick reference or two. People could pick it up, flip through its physical pages, make notes in the margins, whatever.

Now we spend more time analyzing who is using our stuff and for what. We can deliver traditional books, online help systems, interactive learning experiences … whatever the user, the technology, and employer demands. It's about creating information solutions, not writing books. In my opinion, this is one of the best things to come out of the past 20 years.

So, money — let's talk about the evolution of salaries

I've already confessed that my first "high-powered" magazine editor job out of college paid a whopping $10k a year with no benefits. Well, by moving from print journalism to technical writing, I immediately increased my salary by 50%. This was in 1983.

I increased it nearly another 50% by moving from Omaha to Denver a scant year later. Of course, the cost of living was significantly higher here, but not enough to erase the higher salary.

I was able to increase my salary over the years, though not always with such dramatic leaps. By the mid-1990s I was approaching the magic $50k threshold, a threshold my Dad, with an Engineering degree from Colorado School of Mines, would have been stunned by had he lived to see it. By this time I'd earned an MS in Technical Communication and had over a decade of experience.

Then the technology bubble started. Startups had cash, writers were in short supply, and salaries and hourly rates blossomed as companies scrambled to find folks who could hang enough coherent sentences together to tell the world how their products and services worked.

Solid, experienced, talented writers were making $30 and $40 an hour doing contract work. And newbies with nothing to show but some computer experience were making not a lot less than that.

In one very memorable four-month period, I increased my salary by nearly $20k a year.

By the close of the century, some talented writers I knew were making salaries that started with 6s and 7s. A few were making more. Contractors of my acquaintance were getting hourly rates in the $50-$60 range. And people with solid web, usability, and HFE credentials were making even more.

And the bubble bursts

And then, as we all know, dot-coms turned to dot-bombs. So what do salaries and prospects look like now?

Well, if you've got talent and skills, particularly technical skills, you can still earn a good living. But jobs are a lot tougher to find. Don't get me wrong — the work is still out there. But it can take longer to find a job, and the salaries and hourly rates have gone down.

I know writers with the right combination of education, technical skills, and experience who are still making hourly rates in the $50-$60 range. And captives who are still pulling down salaries in the $70s, though I haven't heard of anyone lately who has maintained a salary in the $80s.

What I'm seeing is a lot more contract or contract-to-hire opportunities than captive ones. It is definitely a buyer's market out there, and employers are trying to get the most bang for their contracting or captive buck. Does this mean you should be forced to accept a $25-an-hour gig that would have paid $60 two years ago? No. Though you can bet that someone is hungry enough to do it.

I've got a good friend whose company recently posted a tech comm position on one of the large bid boards. The job posted late in the day on December 23. They received over 300 resumes within days — and this was over the Christmas holiday. My friend tells me they'll whittle down to a dozen or fewer candidates, and then phone-screen. So only a lucky few will get called in to interview.

What does this mean? Well, jobs are out there, and plenty of them. The glory days of 1998-2000 are gone — but not forever.

So how do you go about finding a job?

Work at it. Spend time every single day working at it. I do, and I'm employed. I have a bunch of agents set up on various job boards and search engines that email me about positions that meet the criteria I've specified. This lets me keep tabs on who's hiring, who appears to just be gathering resumes, what industries are hot, and what hourly rates and salaries look like.

Network. Talk to other writers. Let your friends, your neighbors, your fellow church members, your hair stylist, the friendly clerk at your local Safeway know what you do for a living and how good you are at it.

Do some volunteer work. I've been volunteering in various capacities for STC RMC for about 10 years now. Judging in the doc competition. Writing the odd newsletter article. Serving as Jobs Manager and webmaster for the chapter website. I can't tell you how many times I've been fed leads as a direct result of my volunteer activities.

Read the business section of at least one newspaper every day. I'm astonished at the people who don't do this. How else are you going to know what companies are laying off, what companies just got a new contract, or which company was just acquired? A lot of that stuff doesn't make it to the radio or the 5 o'clock news.

Be a "node" ... the person people go to when they want to find out what's going on in the technology world. When they hear of something moving, they'll pass the information along to you. I know it sounds dumb, but believe me, this works. I'm in my current position for this very reason. And be a "good" node and pass the word around when you hear of jobs — yes, even if you're currently looking. Trust me, it pays off. People remember what they perceive as your generosity. I consider it "spreading good karma" ... next time you need a karmic boost, you'll get it. It's happened for me more times than I can count. Besides, didn't your Mom always tell you to share?

So what's next?

Don't ask me. I speculate that the demand for our work will continue to grow as technology does. I read the papers, I listen to the news, I talk to people about what they do and who they do it for.

I guarantee, however, that the people who communicate well in whatever medium, who have a passion for technology, who excel at analyzing their users and delivering what the user needs when he or she needs it, and who have a good time doing all of that will continue to find work.

Or not. What the hell do I know?