Good news: I got nepotism'd into a job. Bad news: I got nepotism'd into a job

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’d been unemployed/part-time employed since last year, but my father (an exec at a tech company) pulled some strings and I may soon be offered a job as a marketing technical writer at his company. It is mostly-remote and pays decently.

There’s just one problem: his company specializes in DRAM, SRAM, NOR Flash, NAND Flash, integrated circuits, eMMCs and the like, and I have only the faintest clue what any of that is all about. I have always been a liberal-arts person; the only time I ever took a physics class was in college and I got a “D.” I may be deep in over my head.

The job may start at any time between next week and next February. I’ve been cram-studying all this tech stuff in the past six days but it feels like trying to do an engineering degree in one month. This is also the first time his company has hired a technical-writer. Any tips to make the dry stuff more interesting?

2

Plain English.

I hate reading technical stuff that feels overloaded with jargon. Also, make sure you understand what you’re writing about. Some years back, I had a boss who decided he needed to rewrite an electrical engineer’s report, and not only did he dumb it down, he stupided it up. Much of what he wrote was flat-out wrong. But he was the boss, so he didn’t need to ask questions, right?

Yeah. Ask questions.

That’s all I’ve got - good luck!

3

If you’re extremely savvy, this could work in your favor.
For some things, you kinda call the shots.

This could work badly against you, though, as you get to be the guinea pig while they work out all the unforeseen problems with the position.

I’ve been first in a brand-new position, and it … can really suck while the kinks are worked out.

That being said, the next portions are pretty bad, knitted together …

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I highly doubt your soon-to-be new co-workers are going to welcome you warmly with open arms.

Good for you for cramming to learn new info in advance as fast as you can. That is a major point in your favor.

4

Marketing to whom? Writing for other industry folks is not the same as writing for general public consumers.

Technical writing is about maximizing approachability. You have to understand the material well enough to translate it for your target audience.

It’s not what you want to hear, but however much cramming you’re doing, double it. If you’re expected to write for trade publications you’re going to get exactly one chance to not make your company look silly.

5

I’m not entirely sure yet for whom - that’s another unsolved issue/question. Although I was told that part of my work may involve editing the writing of many of our engineers in China, who reportedly excel at chip work but have poor English. That’s doable for me, but anything involving writing something tech-y from scratch may be a hurdle until I can really solidify my tech knowledge.

6

If the language/translation issues truly are the substance of this job, then you’re golden.

If, OTOH, you have to sanity check the technical aspects of their work, while fixing translation errors, in some ways that could be harder than starting from scratch.

Not knowing what will be expected of you, who your audience is, the source of your materials, etc., may be your first challenges to tackle.

7

You’ll need the tech knowledge for that, too. You need to be able to look at your ‘translated’ copy and know that, yes, this is an accurate summation of what the engineer meant.

8

Thanks. Yup I be cramming.

Right now I’m hoping the company will delay the start of work for as long as possible, giving me the max study time.

9

I took a technical writing class at the university way back in the dark ages, but the same principles still apply. Be concise, be clear, be as brief as possible and still get the information across. Properly written documents keep you out of court and leave no room for interpretation.

10

What kind of professional writing have you done in the past?

11

I would caution against such optimism. Much of my career was spent as the managing editor of technical books, newsletters, and journals (in the areas of economics, value chains, road engineering, water and sewer infrastructure, air transport safety, ports management, and infrastructure financing). Most of the writers were not native English speakers (and even some who were had terrible writing skills). If a sentence is mangled to the point of ambiguity/incomprehensibility, you have to know enough about the subject matter to figure it out.

My work was sometimes quite difficult, but I was able to edit successfully for several reasons:

First, I had taken operations research, microeconomics, statistics, and econometrics in graduate school. So I had some notion of what people might be referring to in many instances.

Second, I had both excellent Google-fu and ability to divine meaning from gobbledygook, skills that I honed editing for a general interest magazine publisher in Egypt, without the added need for technical understanding.

Third, I usually had quick, consistent access to the authors or other experts who I could ask questions of.

Fourth, the vast majority of my work involved material written by native speakers of Indonesian. While I’m not fluent in the language, I’m competent enough that it really helped understand what Indonesian speakers were trying to say (particularly when the original was in Indonesian and it was the translator who produced gobbled-gook; I just went back to the Indonesian original and read it myself).

If you have advantages like that, and the willingness to become an “instant” (if possibly temporary) expert in various subjects, you will be okay. But accurate editing of badly written technical material can be very challenging.

12

I’ve had some articles published before, but they were all of the political or business/economic nature.

13

So you’re marketing memory huh?

Here’s a freebee to get you started (flash is a type of memory that really does save every one of us…if the ‘us’ is data):

Flash Ah-Ah

14

Well, be prepared for your co-workers to gossip behind your back about how you got your job. If you don’t excel at the beginning, the talk will double down. Nothing worse than a nepo that’s not good at what they were hired for.

15

I’m not sure if it’s the case anymore, but I know a while back that tech industries had specialized magazines and periodicals. So there might be a periodical devoted to the memory chip industry or something. See if there are any mags like that. Chip companies will advertise in those. Your dad may have an idea of some mags. If you can find those, take a look at the ads to get a good idea of what you would need to do.

You can also google “vintage computer ads” for some inspiration:

16

Yup, guess I’m going to have to get heavily into graphic design now too. I’ll start by saving some templates to get my feet wet.

17

Paging @Spoons - former tech writer.

18

We do not hire engineers to be technical writers at the company I work for. We hire writers. Ideally, new tech writers will at least have some sort of tech background, but we also have a LOT of custom vocabulary and acronyms that new writers aren’t expected to know.

We actually send our tech writers through the same two-week introductory course that we send our customers and engineers through. We make a pretty complex industrial control system, and you might think 2 weeks is a long time for an introductory course, but most people describe it as trying to take a drink from a fire hose. You get hit with a lot.

Hopefully the OP’s company will have some sort of training for all of the company and industry-specific lingo.

19

He’s going to be the company’s first technical writer, so maybe not. Maybe the OP should take some time to research industry-standard onboarding for technical writers and be ready to suggest a training schedule for himself.

20

The key question is what sort of writing do they want?

Marketing… you can get away with buzzwords.
But if it’s actual instructional material, you have to know it in detail.

Do you actually have any interest in this technical field yourself?
You might be better off dodging a bullet if not…?