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My first position in documentation (in 1992) was called "Research Engineer"
rather than "Technical Writer." The company had gone through a chain of
technical writers with backgrounds in journalism and English who had turned
out to be unable to grasp the technical areas of their products sufficiently to
do much more than take dictation from engineers and edit it, and had decided
to specifically seek out someone with an engineering background who could
write and hire and pay that person as an engineer. However, when they
eventually transitioned me fron contract to perm and I became their pubs
manager, I convinced them that all we needed to do was adjust the salary
ranges for technical writers to match that of engineers and then add technical
background as a position requirement, because there were plenty of people
who were qualified to be "technical technical writers" who had previously
been passing on their openings and merely needed to be assured that
taking a writing position there would not be a step down in compensation.
Since then the first thing I have done upon joining any company has been
to compare the writer salary ranges to the engineer ranges and align them.
I tell companies that I will do this during the interview when the subject
comes up, and if the company doesn't feel that qualified tech writers should
be hired and paid on the same scale as the engineers, I take a pass on the
job.
>I wonder if this skew in job title is a reaction to the more "wordy" amongst
> us?
>
> A lot of technical writers have a background, or degree, in English, and
> I've read a lot of beautifully worded technical manuals in my time,
> unfortunately it took me twice as long to find out what I was looking for
> but hey, look at that lovely prose...
>
> I'm not saying (dear god, I'm not starting THAT discussion again) that
> writing is not important, just that the ability to work with technical
> people, and understand what is going on, is now valued more?
>
> Just a wonderingment, there IS a reason I'm deliberately hiring more
> "technically able" people...
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