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On 6/26/07, Gordon McLean <Gordon -dot- McLean -at- grahamtechnology -dot- com> wrote:
>
>
> As a hiring team lead I'd be intrigued to meet a candidate that asked
> questions along these lines, but I guess it depends on your company
> politics
> as to whether this approach would work or not?
>
> Great stuff PT!
"Company politics" IS the point. If these questions were problematic for
the company when I was interviewing for a lone writer position, I would move
on. I don't ever want to be in a position where a non-writer or
anyone other than the documentation department (me) sends out documents that
are full of grammatical, formatting, and spelling errors.
As for another poster who remarked about "getting along with everyone right
off the bat," good for you, that's great, (Surely you are not implying that
somehow I "do not get along" with the people I work with?)
If you were working at my job, you wouldn't get "to do whatever" you wanted,
nor would they have changed over to Frame instead of Word. If only. In this
environment, the bosses write and sometimes send out their own docs without
any input from me, and they don't give a hot dog whether anyone objects to
that or not. That is, until someone finds a typo, then they care :-\ They
all use Word so they can "tweak" their documents (and lord-ey the tweaking
I've seen! It's taken hours sometimes to get it out of there!)
That's why that little extra list of questions has been added to my "lone
writer" required interview questions. If the position was within a
documentation department where there was a leader (or I was to be the
leader, which I have done) and there was a documentation management
process in place, the list of questions would be significantly different,
and would address the processes that they had in place.
But I think that's the point. Adjust the questions to the job interview for
the job at hand.
I do learn from my mistakes, and hopefully, that will keep me from repeating
them.
:-)
PT
--
> PT
> pro -dot- techwriter -at- gmail -dot- com
> I'm a Technical Technical Writer!
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