- What advice do you have for me in beginning my preparation for this career?
You really need to be sure you have a thick enough skin to handle it. Criticism is not always constructive. Also, the people producing the products you are documenting may not be the greatest communicators ever, so you really have to be able to tease information out of them.
You also need to be able to write about something you don’t understand. Some people feel the need to know every little detail about something before they can start writing about it.
You don’t have time to completely understand the product, and you don’t need to. All you need to do is translate from one kind of geek into another kind of geek.
- What qualifications would you consider “must haves” for this career?
You should have a degree in something relevant, either English, Journalism, Computer Science (if you want high tech jobs), or
Communications would give you the most flexibiilty, but there is a growing demand for Biology and Chemistry folks to work in more specialized fields.
I have a BA in English, plus a bunch of computer science classes taken at night from local Junior Colleges.
You probably need to learn Framemaker. For my job I also need to know Visio, Acrobat, and MS Visual SourceSafe. People who do web-based help need HTML and XML.
I do API documentation, which requires a general knowledge of programming concepts, and specific knowledge of C, C++, and Java. I go to school at night to fill those languages out. I’m taking Java now, and will probably take an SQL class later. At the moment my job is fairly precarious so I will also be learning to deal with Unix and maybe some basic networking so I can add those keywords to my resume.
- What was your career path?
Mine was a long strange trip:
Tow truck dispatcher for AAA
Electrologist
Administrative Assistant (temp)
Junior High School Teacher
Assistant Buyer (Williams Sonoma/Pottery Barn)
Game Tester (company contracted with software developers)
Quality Engineer (dotcom)
Technical Writer
- What ethical issues have you encountered in your profession or position?
I’m not sure that I’ve encountered any ethical issues. Everything is pretty clear. If you’re lifting words directly from a functional spec, make sure to credit the original author if necessary.
How was the dilemma resolved?
I’ll let you know when I find a real problem.
- What are the upcoming issues in the field of technical writing/editing?
Somebody else mentioned it - in high tech there’s a big debate about structured documentation and which help formats are best. I pretty much avoid the discussion since my project is one of the rare manuals that would not be served by conversion to help. It’s PDF all the way for me.
- What do you enjoy about being a technical writer/editor?
In general, I like the independence. I make good money, I am a full time employee (for the moment, more layoffs are coming) with full benefits, but I also get to come and go as I please and work from home 3 days a week.
Specific to the job itself, I like making difficult information more accessible to people. I like the challenge of making the pieces of the puzzle fit, and I find the product we’re producing to be very interesting technologically.
- What do you dislike about being a technical writer/editor?
Most people have no idea what goes into the job. This is not a 40 hour/week gig. The product I’m working on is in my head, all of the time.
In many places engineers have little or no respect for writers, and many engineering managers don’t see why the engineers should make a priority of talking to the writers or doing technical reviews of the manuals before they go out.
There is also absolutely no concept of how much time things take. Due to some heinous decisions by management in the last round of layoffs, I am now solely responsible for maintenence of three very different versions of the same manual, totalling about 18,000 pages. There is no possible way for one person to do that. There is no possible way for me to even read it all in a year, so my job right now is pretty much just going around and patching the leaks when I see them.
My manuals look like crap and there’s nothing I can do about it, because we have no editors or even other writers that can do even a simple proofread of my work. 
However, they are technically accurate, and that’s my top priority.