Re: Yahoo has no staff tech writers

Subject: Re: Yahoo has no staff tech writers
From: Andrew Plato <gilliankitty -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:08:01 -0700 (PDT)


"Chuck Martin" <> wrote ...

> All the more reason to have someone on staff. Those changes are planned, and
> a staff technical communicator can not only help in shaping new designs,
> making them more usable, any needed additional documentation can be done as
> the design is being implemented--without a need to ramp up and what's being
> done. That's simply not the case with a contractor.

That's just not how it works in that business. Things are not planned at the
depth of other businesses. Again, Yahoo seems to be doing okay, so I don't see
any reason for changing that.

And furthermore, technical writers are not responsible for shaping designs. I
know every third STC seminar tells you that you have this right. But the fact is,
many organizations have no interest in having tech writers have ANY input on
design. And demanding this job on day one is a super-fast way to have yourself
escorted out the doors.

If you want to shape design, you need to move into a production manager or
designer job. And that is a different discipline than tech writing. Now, some
organizations will permit a writer to be involved in the design process, but
usually that is well after that writer has already proven his/her ability to
produce useful documentation. Rarely is that job handed over on day one.

> But their business is hurting. Many people who need to search for something
> on the web, once Yahoo!'s bread and butter, now turn to somewhere else.
> Heck, I even have Google's toolbar installed on my IE browser.

But it obviously isn't. They reported high profitability recently. Remember, you
pay Yahoo NOTHING to search their site. He who has the money, makes the rules.

> Their CEO has an attitute of stockholder first, not user first. I'd surmise
> they are stil so popular because of (a) inertia (I still use My Yahoo! as my
> default home page) and (b) they still catch some percentage of new Internet
> users. But I bet the percentage of all Internet users who use Yahoo!
> services has fallen, and will continue to fall.

Every single public company in the world has an attitude of stockholder first.
That's business. Because stockholders have a real stake in the business. You
contribute nothing to Yahoo. And clearly, people are willing to use it without
extensive help files. So, inductive reasoning here would suggest that whatever
yahoo is doing is working.

Users are not lost little puppies that need the tender guidance of caring
technical writers. And moreover, many businesses have collapsed into oblivion
with user obsessions.

Many firms simply are having a hard time justifying tech writers on staff. This
is largely due in part to the overwhelming incompetence in the tech writing
profession. Why pay a person a big salary when they refuse to learn the
technologies of their own employer? When they spend night and day obsessively
masticating over the most pointless minutia of grammar and FrameMaker and totally
ignoring the worthless content they are generating. When writers eat up months
and months of work building elaborate single-source systems that produce crap.

There too little pragmatism in tech writing and when the economy is in the
crapper, like it is now, starry-eyed promises of usability based on theories
gleaned from web sites is just not worth the investment.

Andrew Plato

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