I have accepted I will never be a great computer programmer. Also, unlike many other jobs, programming seems to get harder and harder while you age.
However, I am quite skilled at writing. My English leaves a lot to desire but I can write my own language very smoothly and I am also quite good at explaining stuff I think. I generally understand decently how different kind of technical systems work, but of course I know the IT terminology and techniques the best. I can also visualize to some degree.
Any ideas how to use this skills combined? First thing I thought was IT, science and tech journalism but journalism seems to be quite shaky career these days?
If you’re reasonably personable, and have a pretty good handle on how business processes work and how they translate into IT projects, you might be able to be a good business analyst.
Basically what the job consists of is being the guy who goes and asks the business people what they’re trying to do, and how they’re envisioning it being done, and then writing all that up in a concise, clear document to give the technical guys something to work from.
In a very broad sense, you’re a sort of high-level designer, in that you’re the guy who keeps the business discussions on track, plays the “voice of reason”, and nails down the project scope to exactly what they want and what can be done. Knowing the technical side of things is good, because it both makes your “voice of reason” more believable and accurate, and it also lets you write up the requirements in ways that are more comprehensible to the people actually implementing the technical solutions.
But ultimately the job is gathering and codifying requirements and making the business think their idea through with you, and then writing down what results in a clear and coherent document for the technical people to implement.
I work with a search engine optimization firm that seems to have less-than-zero technical skills. They also don’t seem to have much in the way of writing skills. But considering how much they need me to fill in the gaps for them, and how they are able to keep a company afloat after all these years, I would suspect that someone that can write AND understand how the Web works would be a great employee at an SEO firm (or starting their own firm).
Agree that manuals and documentation would be a good possibility. You can write much better when you understand the subject. When my wife rewrites or edits medical stuff she can tell when the writer didn’t quite get the material.
Another possibility in your native language are on-line encyclopedias. They are often looking for people with subject matter experience to write or revise entries. It helps if you have clips - something published somewhere.
IT journalists are journalists first, so that isn’t a good choice really.
I’m an engineer with good writing skills who fell into patent application writing and prosecution a few years ago. I write up the applications and responses to the patent office and my boss, the attorney, signs off on them and files them.
You need technical skills to understand the invention, and writing skills to write it up in legal writing and then argue it back and forth with the patent office. I like the work a lot, although writing patents is harder than I thought it would be. I love writing the arguments to the patent office though, and patent stuff seems to be a lot in demand these days. I’m in the US, so YMMV.
IT security assessor. You have to read and understand the security requirements, and explain them to people who just want to get on with publishing their software (security be damned, because that worked so well).
My first thought was a technical writer. Understanding systems at a higher level and technical terms while not being too in the weeds is a good place to be. If a technical writer has too much specific knowledge, they might actually end up a little too low level which sort of defeats the purpose.
I like the suggestion of security auditing too. Again, you need to have a high level understanding of systems and how various security settings affect it and prioritize them or write exceptions, but you don’t need to be all in the weeds about how they’re actually implemented.
I don’t know how your management skills are, but particularly from my experience with government, a lot of the supervisor level jobs would fall into the category of having a high level understanding, setting priorities for projects, and writing documentation, but not doing a whole lot of implementation themselves.
I don’t think technical journalism will ultimately be all that much use. A lot of news is either so high level that a more typical journalist can probably cover it with minimal specific knowledge, or it’s so low level that it needs to be done by experts. For me, I either just want a quick over view of the new technology, or I want down and dirty discussion about how to work with it.
I spent several years being the writer at a software firm. My coding was nonexistent - I didn’t learn HTML until after I left - but I was busy full-time. There’s a huge variety of words that need to be associated with code. Manuals were just the obvious part. Eventually I wrote everything from the specifications to start a project to the help files at the end of one. You would probably need to learn ISO 9000 level of procedures, but there are courses for that.
For that matter, there are whole degrees aimed at technical writing. And a powerful and very useful national organization, the Society for Technical Communication. They do lots of online education and have technical conferences. Obviously, I don’t agree with Blaster Master on that subject, although the rest of the post has good advice. Technical writing is not at all the same thing as technical journalism, so he may have been making a distinction I didn’t catch. I would start by exploring the STC site thoroughly.
Software needs to go through several levels of specification, testing, and revision control. Software companies do this on their own, and certain industries that are highly failure-sensitive or regulated do it themselves as well. Pharmaceutical companies, in particular, validate every computerized system that has product impact or regulatory compliance implications, from inventory to document management to lab instruments. I was a QC chemist for years, but now this is my job. Not all such companies are willing to accept recruits from outside their industries, but your skills could be attractive to some, especially if you get some certification.
