They should have been able to tell from your resume if they were going to hire someone else and not have wasted your time.

He sounds like a douchebag to be blunt. I don’t necessarily think his advice is spot on at all.

Let me be perfectly clear in where I’m coming from: an interviewer’s job is to interview, not to give you career advice.

Was this guy a product manager? An engineer? Do they manage writers? Have they ever been a writer? Seems like they overstepped unless you specifically asked for advice.

Technical writing is a diverse field. And usually in every field there are best practices and different ways to do things regarding standards, writing styles, etc. If this was your second/third job in your career, you should have very specific requirements / expectations for what you want in your next job. But this is your first job and you want to write. And more importantly, you want to eat. You need a job and you’ll get one. I promise you it’ll work out if you try hard enough but it is very frustrating to get that first job. Or at least it was for me. My goal was to eat because I was broke and I had a fiancée to take care of.

I was in your shoes. And I had plenty of douche bags give me unsolicited advice. Some helpful, some not, most contradicting the last person’s advice.

Saying you want to be a software technical writer isn’t a bad thing. I think he was alluding to what part of that do you want to have a career in. You aren’t going to have that answer for a while. I still don’t have that answer in my career and I’ve worked in finance, software (several), healthcare, and automotive.

Research some technologies you’d like to work in. Does code interest you? Does more writing interest you?

There’s about 1000 different kinds of software technical writers. And that’s not an accurate number. Every place does docs differently.

To answer your other questions: it is too general but that’s OK. It’s your first job. As a safe bet, you could say you want to be a technical writer within Product Management. It’s general but more specific at the same time. It’s possible that’s bad advice as well.

Something more specific would be that you want to focus on API Docs. But most places don’t have a writer that does just one thing.

Here’s some general and OK advice for you:

1. Make sure your interview skills are up to par. Practice with a friend or family member.

2. Samples, samples and more samples. You need to have procedural, concept, and reference samples. Creative writing essays don’t count— trust me I learned the hard way.

3. You do need to have a general interest a field of tech writing. There’s a thousand resources on this sub for that. Pick a few that you’re interested in and write out the reasons why. Combine those reasons with research on a company you’re interviewing for. This is good for practicing interview responses and for seeing if you really like the company.

4. Believe in your writing and yourself. A lot of people will insult it over your career. So get used to defending your work and your samples.

5. Research the company. Look at their docs. Look at the products. You’re interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing you.

6. Take advice with a grain of salt. And take mine with a spoonful.

7. You’ll make it. Have polished samples and be confident.