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Will Husa noted:
> Paul,
> If you really want independence, then you should become a lone gunman.
> Being
> an independent contractor allows you to negotiate your pay per
project. If
> your skill set is in demand, then your rate reflects what the market
will
> bear.
>
> Frequently, you are the only technical writer on the project.
Instantly,
> you become the senior technical writer!
That also applies to situations like mine and (I'm sure) many others on
the list. I'm not a contractor; I'm part of a corporate stable, but each
of us pretty much lives and works on her/his own, in each our separate
cities around the world, and on each our separate product lines.
Most of us are listed as "Senior Technical Writer".
The job is to participate in the release process for our products,
helping to define the docs that should go with a given product/release,
then creating or updating those docs, scheduling ourselves in
conjunction with the product/project managers, engineers, testers to
complete the documents, get them reviewed, fixed, and out the door in
time for each release.
Oh, and to try to _not_ be the bottleneck even though there are (as many
as) dozens of engineers/developers, two or three product managers,
several testers, but only one writer for the multiple products in the
lines we handle, and the release schedules often stack and overlap.
I confess that I don't meet all the requirements that Leonard proposed
for the "ideal" Senior Technical Writer, unless "experience with" can be
construed as "met that once" or "did some reading on that". I have
experience with what I've done, and I'm adaptable enough to make my
familiar tools work in a new environment or to learn new tools when
that's called for. For example, I work in a PC environment, but I once
worked a year in a Mac environment. I could do that again, but it was
quite a few years ago, and Mac has changed at least as much as PC in
that time, so I'd be learning almost from scratch (what had remained
constant, I would have forgotten, and what I remembered would have
changed... no cynic here...). But having done that once, I'm confident I
could do it again, and probably more smoothly given how things have
matured and converged in both environments.
I find myself in the strange (to me) position of working in a company
where I am more and more able to get a lot of the information that I
need from project documents (Requirements docs, specifications,
statements of work, and so on, that are actually [a] written, and [b]
written on time), where I've long been accustomed to winging it, and
getting my info by dealing with SMEs and by using the product (or
something that kinda resembles what will be the product). The increasing
maturity of the project docs, as our company matures, would be making my
job easier, except that the workload increases apace. That is, it's
getting easier to achieve each individual thing, but there are more
things to do in the same space of time, so it's a wash.
So, all of that to say that some people here would hire me and allow me
to keep my current title of "Senior Technical Writer", while others
would hire me and demote me, while still others wouldn't hire me.
Depending on their situations and that of their industries, they'd all
be correct to do so.
Doesn't help much, huh?
Kevin
Writerguy
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