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Dori Green wrote:
> Some of these dollar figures can come from risk avoidance ...
Thank you, Dori, for that excellent approach. Too often we can get cornered by bean counters into having to justify ourselves. We worry about being replaced by someone who can type faster, or who can update 20 documents in a single day without thinking about the use or content of any of them.
Some of us do internals docs for software. What's the cost of not having docs for the xyzzy() routine in that obscure C program? That can be a hard question to answer, and deferring the documentation effort to a time in the distant future can save an entire tech writer's salary and overhead! I suspect that not documenting software internals is akin to employing "job-security" programmers, who write code that nobody can fathom.
Whaddya bet that nearly all software needs the attention of tech writers, and that most does not get any? In my current work I write about standards and only occasionally glance at code. When I do, I see bugs--bugs in the comments and occasionally bugs in the code. Every good tech writer I've known is a compulsive proofreader.
Is there one of us who can write up a good case, for presentation to bean counters, er, I mean Managers With Accounting Backgrounds, for the bottom-line economic benefits of employing tech writers? Or (better yet?) point us all to a URL for one that already exists?
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