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Re: "Surviving the Dying Career of Technical Writing"
Subject:Re: "Surviving the Dying Career of Technical Writing" From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 22 Mar 2016 18:25:25 -0700
A place I worked a while back outsourced some server development
India. The developers did solid work so long as they had good specs
(any ambiguity could result in useless code that had to be redone).
They wrote documentation as well but it was unusable, didn't reflect
any understanding of common use cases or the audience. It wasn't even
very useful for me in writing the real documentation.
A few years later the company tried to outsource documentation to
Romania, I guess that didn't work out too well since last I heard they
laid off all their tech writers and moved the docs to Spain.
On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 6:02 PM, William Sherman
<bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com> wrote:
> ... Twelve years ago at Cisco, we had partnered with a group in India to offload
> some of our manuals. Most didn't see this as training someone to do our jobs
> cheaper. But what happened was that we ended it after production costs
> nearly tripled since the rework was much more, the delays were more, the
> number of people having to get involved were more, and it just wasn't
> working. Less than a year later, most in our LOB were gone and the work was
> sent to India. (And you wonder why Cisco stock sits were it does.)
>
> I guess after ten years, those in India are having issues now.
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