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>I am amazed when I hear writers say they wrote documentation for an
>application and have never used the application...
And Barb Philbrick responded:
>Please say it ain't so! ...
>Do many of you write documents without using the equipment or
application?
I think (hope?) this happens less often than it used to. In my hardware
writing days I sometimes turned out hardware manuals for a relabeled
piece
of equipment from the original documentation, without ever seeing the
equipment itself. At that same company, I distinctly remember arguing
long and hard that I needed to have admin priviledges on the system if
I was going to write the System Administration Guide. I won that one.
It certainly isn't the case now, though I could wish we had a longer
test/review
cycle for the docs after development finishes an upgrade.
Back to the original topic of this thread, I'm interested to hear that
people find
that a knowledge of programming languages is more of a hiring litmus test
than
a real job requirement. Just as I always suspected!
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