RE: Why are companies now requiring techical writer candidates to be SMEs?

[Gene Kim-Eng <gene -at- genek -dot- com>]

Nope, no statistics, just my own observations (and my own experience as
a hiring manager writing such superspecific descriptions when I already
had a candidate).  Of course, in the recently-ended dotcom boom it was
often so hard to find a fully qualified candidate that we often wrote very
loose job descriptions, so what's probably happening is just that looseness
tightening back up again.  Also, I do recall the days before I became a
tech writer (when I was an engineer), back in the 70's and 80's it was not
unusual to see tech writers jumping back and forth between wildly different
industries.  Probably because we engineers did a lot more early drafting
than is done today and tech writers in some fields weren't used for much
more than fixing our grammar and spelling and managing the docs through
paste-ups and printing.  As for what is "unreasonable" or "unfair," when
you're the hiring manager, you're responsible for having people who are
sufficiently qualified and for balancing the time needed to find them or train
people who have less experience against all your other responsibilities; I
don't think there's really an issue or reasobability or fairness when someone
in that corner makes a judgement based on those pressures.  Supply and
demand just means that sometimes there are fewer opportunities than at
other times.  Facts of life we have to deal with, and while it may be an
interesting subject for analysis, I'm trying not to expend unnecessary
energy in lamenting over them.

Gene Kim-Eng



At 12:47 PM 4/20/2003 -0700, Lisa Wright wrote: