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Tom Huffman said...
> Having recently changed careers from academia to tech
> writing and conducting my first tech writing job search, I'm
> amazed at how many jobs ask for programming experience. Is
> there really any significant number of tech writers who, in
> addition to the skills required to succeed even as a very
> technically oriented writer, know how to write C++ code?
I don't have to write C++ as part of my job--which is good,
since I hate C++. However, I find that having a double major[0]
in college and some real-world programming experience ups my
credibility with the programmers who tend to be the ones who
run IS departments. I don't think this is fair, but it gets me
good jobs. :-) Our other writers don't have programming
experience, and it mostly isn't an issue, except with programmer
snobbishness.
The other bonus is that I get the cool help projects to work
on. I get the more technically-oriented projects, like documenting
how engineers can write calculations for machinery dimensions in
a limited version of VB. You should see my snappy annotated code
in the help for that program. :-) It also means I'm usually the
only writer around who can do that kind of documentation, and
that's a bonus--and an ego boost.
FWIW, I can easily hack out code in assembly language, VBA, C, SQL
and PL/SQL. I think the background in analyzing problems and writing
code to solve them is more important than the language. Once
you learn one, picking up another one is usually pretty easy. The
Unix/Linux, Oracle, and NT experience doesn't hurt, either.
[0] Computer science and English, earned way after I started being
a writer for money--and a minor in accounting.
Julie Comstock-Fisher Documentation Manager
julief -at- pdainc -dot- com PDA, Inc.
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