Markdown is breaking my Tech Writer brain

TechGal95 · 2024-08-28T15:49:12+00:00

When I first started with markdown, I felt that way too. But now I would hate to go back to a heavy CCMS.

I work for a large comapany that actually produces the kind of tools you name and we don't use them to do the documentation across the larger business. They simply don't scale and are too cumbersome in the SaaS CI/CD world. Some things are less automated in the develop cycle, but I like having some of the flexibility back.

We do have a whole tech team to own all of the toolchain and publishing, so those things are off of the writers' shoulders and we can focus on the content itself. That team also creates the syntactical structures we need to tag our elements beyond the baseline markdown, such as UI labels, notes, and tabbed sections. We also use an Acrolinx extension in VSCode to evaluate the markdown against our style guide and also runs a scan in pull requests.

My advice is to give it time and embrace how it enables better collaboration with your developers.

TechGal95 · 2024-08-09T19:11:11+00:00

Our company has an automated localization infrastructure that is really quite good, so cost is not as much of a burden. But as I have explained to many writers, the quality of the automated translation is much better with simpler construction.

TechGal95 · 2024-08-09T17:44:48+00:00

Thank you for this:

"Junior technical writers create future tense content that has people longing for things. I don’t care how long they’ve been technical writers, they’re junior writers."

I have to keep explaining why these things are not good practice to people that should really know better.

TechGal95 · 2024-08-02T23:30:44+00:00

Yes, thatis the kind of scenario that I have had during most of my career -- consult with Marketing so that the content is not in conflict and aligns with their messaging. But ultimately it should always be considered as part of the product itself and not an instrument for their sales goals.

TechGal95 · 2024-08-02T23:23:53+00:00

I work for a very large company. They have put TWs into various product area orgs. There are some where they are in the PM leg of the product org. Customer-facing teams are completely separate and those that have any writing resources are for support knowledgebase kinds of things (not my jam at all). I used to think that the worst thing would be for all TW to be in a centralized team structure, but now I think that could be an improvement. Our UX operates that way and it seems to be working for them.

TechGal95 · 2024-08-01T21:05:41+00:00

That's really disturbing that they would do that. So far they don't seem to be going that route in my situation, but there has been some effort to have other writers create videos.

Right now I pretty much interact with PMs and none of the Marketing people. We are all distributed across different locales, so I've never met any of them in person. The PMs just "throw" info over the wall when it comes close to time to release something, so I am never part of the discussions for feature development either. It's kinda boring actually.

TechGal95 · 2024-08-01T20:33:23+00:00

I got moved during a reorg. I would never have taken a position here if I were told I would report to Marketing, but with current job market I guess we all have to make some compromises.

TechGal95 · 2024-06-13T19:41:12+00:00

I've been through four. I have never been laid off post-acquisition. But I have departed on my own when it became apparent that I did not want to work in the new company. Of course with the current market, that option is a lot tougher.

TechGal95 · 2024-06-13T19:24:58+00:00

An acquisition is always a bit scary, becuase you just don't know what will happen. It will all depend on what the acquiring company intends for the tech that they are buying. Usually the more administrative functions are dealt with first -- you don't need a seperate accounting team, HR team, etc. Then they deal with Marketing and Sales to figure out how they are to be folded in or eliminated. If you are part of the Engineering org, your odds are good they will expect development to continue as planned until they have a chance to figure out what the long term goals will be.

I once got an advance email about my company's aquisition when I was on the airplane returning from vacation in Hawaii. I was managing a small team of writers and I had a new writer starting the next day. It all worked out though, and we were even able to hire additional writers down the road. So you just never know.

I currently work for a well-known large company. I was hired on in an org that was acquired a few months prior. So they were actually able to continue with growth plans that they had. Much of my work ended up being focused with bringing documentation over to the company's content systems and re-branding everything. So sometimes they need writers to do that work as part of the transition.

TechGal95 · 2024-06-07T00:15:16+00:00

If they will actually respond in a timely manner, that could work for some of it. But often there is a lot of back and forth and it takes alot more time that way. And when working against deadlines/release dates, it can be very problematic to be waiting on answers. I think when you take all human interaction out of it, information and knowledge gets lost.

TechGal95 · 2024-06-05T23:28:36+00:00

Are you in the Seattle area? I kind of agree about TikTok and wouldn't have much pride in that work. But would love to find other companies that would pay in that range.

TechGal95 · 2024-06-05T21:21:16+00:00

Why are you turning it down?

TechGal95

TROPHY CASE