Re: Outsourcing Tech Pubs
Our company just laid off the User Education manager and one tech writer in order to downsize the tech pubs group and start a new one in India. A once proud tech pubs group with a manager, three full-time tech writers, a part time editor, full-time curriculum developer, and two full-time contractors is now down to just three full-time tech writers.
Ouch
Is this the wave of the future? Are others seeing the same happen at their places of employmet?
It is not the wave of the future; it is the save of the present. Bean counters who cannot see past the end of next quarter have adopted this penny wise, yet pound foolish tactic to prop up too-high stock prices and maintain too-high stock price expectiations. However, recent trands ahve shown that true savings are not nearly what have been promised, for two primary reasons.
First, in areas such a Bangalore, India, a market similar to Silicon Valley in the 90s is developing. Engineering talent there is job hopping, bouncing from job to job and getting increasing salaries for each one. All this increases costs, from recruiting to retention.
Second, the atual cost of managing the remote work has turned out to be hugher than promised. Much more hands-on time turns out to be needed, meaning the people left behind have even less time to do the work they were hired for.
Locally, this can all be seen as a Bad Thing. Globally, it's a different story. The knowledge economy is heading now in a direction similar to the manufacturing economy of previous decades. In an industry where it's trickier to quantify ROI (unlike, say, programmers, who can claim X lines of code per day), when that's not done, it's easier for the abovementioned bean counters to eliminate what to them seems only an expense that affects (a) the bottom line and (b) the stock price.
There have been some articvles and presentations in recent years, some STC-related, some not, on how to establish a technical writer's ROI.
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Chuck Martin
User Assistance & Experience Engineer
twriter "at" sonic "dot" net www.writeforyou.com
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