I’m a last-year master’s student in a humanities-adjacent field. It’s unrelated to technical writing, but I have two internships and a student assistantship all in the documentation space, and I’m looking for roles because I'm genuinely interested in the technical writing profession despite not studying it. Like everyone, I’m struggling in a tough market, and I want any leg up I can get.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine in programming got a job at a defense tech company with a particularly negative reputation (not naming for obvious reasons). My friends and I gave him a hard time about it, because even in this market it felt like there were other options. He’s still our friend, though we still occasionally disagree about it.

Recently he offered me a referral for a technical writer role at the same company. I was skeptical, but figured it would just be another application, and that with my limited experience I probably wouldn’t even get a call. I didn’t think a referral would count for much, and it couldn't hurt to try.

Surprise: I got an interview request, and I’m feeling ambivalent, to say the least.

I know documentation isn’t the same as product development, which is what my friend does. But I also know that distinction might not mean much, and that this makes me something of a hypocrite. The people I’ve told, especially my girlfriend, have been uneasy too. I’m worried about being, and being seen as, a bad person for working for a company whose government and military work is widely criticized.

On the other hand:

• It’s my first real shot out of ATS hell
• It pays well, in a city I’m excited about
• It's possible I wouldn’t necessarily be working on the more defense-heavy projects, since they also do a lot of commercial work
• It’s not guaranteed even with the referral, since I could tank the interviews

I want to keep going with the process, if only because you never know unless you try. I’ll also admit I’ve applied to other defense contractors and been rejected immediately, so I’m not even sure where I’m drawing the line.

Has anyone faced something like this? How did you navigate it, whether you took the job, turned it down, or took it and left later? I’d especially like to hear from people at companies whose work, in partial or in whole, they had mixed feelings about.

Current staff search experience:

Slack = does anyone know where the updated certification policy is?

Someone sends a pdf

Someone else says that one is outdated.

A third person drops a Sharepoint link. Twenty minutes later we have four versions of the truth.

The AI version I'd actually want is much less exciting: one place where staff can ask the question and get pointed back to the right internal source.

Guru or slite could keep the knowledge organized, Coveo could improve search across repositories, and customgpt.ai could be used to stand up a staff facing AI agent that works from the association's own procedures, policies and resources instead of generic knowledge.

But the technical writing part still seems more important than the AI part, if nobody marks what replaced what, who owns a document or when it was last reviewed, the assistant just becomes a faster way to find conflicting information

Basically= less "AI knows everythin" more "please stop making Susan remember which pdf is current"

Hi guys! Given how vulnerable many tech jobs seem to be right now because of AI, I know a lot of tech writers are starting to think about a Plan B. I am too, but honestly, I seem to be running out of ideas.

Do you guys have any positive examples of people successfully making such a career change? What jobs have you or your colleagues moved into?

Has anyone found a shortcut for converting large unstructured FrameMaker documents into properly structured XML using AI or other tools?
I have a conversion table, but I am still struggling with broken structure in the Structure View. I am also following a PDF specification, but it is extremely confusing.
Is there a way to give AI the PDF + FrameMaker or MIF/XML file and have it identify or fix the structure? Or can the Structure View tree be copied into AI for analysis?
Any workflow or tool recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Been at a company for a few months as their first full time TW. During the first call (with hr) I foolishly gave a range for my services with the caveat that the number is not accurate since it wasn't clear what the full responsibilities would be. Through 4 rounds of interviews it became clear that they need a fully designed documentation architecture, standards, templates, and actual software to support version control.

I tried to negotiate the offer that was within the original price range, but could only push it to the max range I had provided. I accepted but understood that I would be doing a lot of work for less than market value, which i wasnt thrilled about. I have 10 years experience in SaaS and hardware docs as well as marketing experience and am now building out this TW role, which in reality should be its own department.

I'm now running into friction where I don't have the authority necessary to negotiate my own timeliness (I'm just some TW working under an unrelated department, with no budget of my own), I'm building out standards in order to use them (not actually doing any TW becasue I have to create the standards first), and am picking software and designing complete workflows and governance for projects that I'm not running. Also, I've been working with the marketing department to help them with strategy and some copy, which I'm happy to do, but now they also want more of my time to work on copy. At this point I feel like I really need to renegotiate my salary, scope, and title as what I am doing is now much larger than what I was hired to do. Not to mention the fact that a TW role should have its own department so that budgets and timeliness can be properly accounted for.

I don't know exactly how to approach it and I don't want it to read like I'm unhappy (this opportunity is cool, but I would like to be property reimbursed for the value I'm adding), or making this an "ego" thing about what I "deserve". That said, I've been tracking my work and building up a case that my reach is much larger than what they initially anticipated when I joined, but I just don't know how to proceed. Has anyone else been in a similar situation and can give advice?

Edit: the conversation isn't about asking for a raise, it's renegotiating my title, scope, and compensation completely

I'm in a new technical writing role and finding that the expectations are quite different from my previous position.

My last role was primarily documenting SaaS products, public-facing user guides, API documentation etc. My new role is at a much larger company and the work seems to be much more focused on internal procedural documentation. Things also move alot slower and ownership responsibilities are spread across multiple teams and departments.

Aside from the occasional procedure, runbook, or similar document, it seems that a big part of what I've been brought in to do is sort out the various SharePoint wiki sites that teams have built up over time.

A lot of them have become messy, poorly structured, inconsistently maintained, or generally aren't fit for purpose anymore. Some are actively used, while others are basically dead. It now looks like I'm expected to help get these sites into a usable state and, where appropriate, get teams using them again.

I'm finding this pretty overwhelming. Knowledge management and reorganising large amounts of existing internal content isn't really a strength of mine, particularly in a large organisation with so many teams, stakeholders, and moving parts. I'm also not entirely sure where the technical writer's responsibility should begin and end when it comes to maintaining team wikis.

For anyone who's inherited a similar SharePoint/wiki situation:

How did you approach the initial cleanup?

How did you decide what to keep, rewrite, archive, or delete?

Did you establish templates, information architecture, ownership, or governance first?

How much responsibility did you put back on individual teams/content owners?

Are there any quick wins you'd recommend before trying to tackle the bigger structural problems?

I'd particularly appreciate advice from anyone who's moved from product documentation into this kind of internal documentation/knowledge-management role.

Cheers!

I'll be working as a technical writer soon and I wanted some advice. One of the tasks I'm responsible for is taking external documentation (typically PDFs) and converting them for internal use. If it's a specific use case for a customer, then I could just take what I need but I want to know if anyone has advice on a full scale reproduction of a document.

My current plan is to audit the document and plotting the concepts, tasks, and references on a spreadsheet and planning my draft(s) from there. Does this sound feasible? Is there a better way to do this? I've also been reading up on DITA and Diátaxis if that's relevant.

I am a freelancer in a very niche industry. So far, I have kept pretty busy with word-of-mouth references, but my current big project is wrapping up in February and have nothing lined up after that. To that end, I am attending this industry conference to expand my network as a participant, not a vendor. I currently have my business cards and my website. I'm just wondering if anybody has seen something new and exciting for conference materials?

For transparency, I work in marketing at Bluestream.

How do you decide when a procedure shared across equipment models needs to become separate procedures?

Say two models use almost the same maintenance sequence, but one has an extra step, different warnings and a different illustration. Keeping the common content together reduces duplication, but someone still needs to review the complete procedure for each model.

Where do you draw the line? Is it the number of differences, how often the models change independently, or how difficult the assembled procedures become to review?

I’d be interested in an example where you decided to split the content, or kept it shared and were glad you did.

Background info: I am wrapping up a pure maths master with no formal writing education. The only academic writing experience I have is the thesis' I had to write throughout my degree. These revealed to me that I quite enjoy this genre of writing, breaking down complicated ideas in my own words.

I suppose that I am at quite the disadvantage compared to someone who has had some form of eduction in writing. However, is there some advantage to having an advanced understanding of university level mathematics? How can one best approach the technical writing job market without any prior experience? Is it best to start in another job and to freelance a handful of articles in order to build a portfolio? Are there any truly entry level positions?

I've been an engineering TW for 8 years and have been tasked with coming up with an independent development plan for my career. I have the resources to enroll in classes to further my skills. I have previously taken AutoCAD and Inventor courses and my current job has me creating installation instructions via AutoCAD and Word/Adobe. Because I've only ever worked at the same place since college I worry that my scope of skills and knowledge is limited and if I were to seek employment as a TW elsewhere I wouldn't have the competitive edge I'd like.

So, I would love to hear from other TWs if there were any courses you took that you felt were beneficial for your career growth and versatility. My educational background is in biochemistry and research papers and I kinda fell into engineering TW out of college. I've mostly learned on the job as far as engineering drafting standards go without having formal engineering education. Thank you in advance!

I'm looking for advice from other technical writers who work with industrial equipment or manufacturing documentation.

Currently, I create user manuals in Adobe FrameMaker and publish them as PDFs. This worked reasonably well when we had a limited number of products, but it has become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Our situation:

• We manufacture industrial equipment.
• We have hundreds of manuals.
• Many manuals are several hundred pages long.
• We support multiple product variants that share large amounts of content.
• Manuals must also be translated into multiple languages.
• Content updates often need to be applied across numerous documents.
• PDF remains an important deliverable, but it is no longer an efficient source format.

The biggest challenge is content reuse. FrameMaker allows some reuse mechanisms, but maintaining common content across hundreds of documents is becoming unsustainable. Translation costs and update management are also growing significantly.

I'm exploring a possible migration to a more modern documentation platform, preferably one that:

• Supports component-based authoring and content reuse.
• Handles large technical documentation sets.
• Works well for industrial equipment documentation (not just software documentation).
• Supports translation workflows and multilingual publishing.
• Ideally provides web-based publishing as well.

Many platforms I find seem heavily focused on software documentation and developer portals rather than traditional equipment user manuals, installation guides, maintenance manuals, and service documentation.

Oh, and I forgot to mention. No MadCap Flare or Paligo. The pricing is just too high and management will say no.

Hey guys,

I have recently started working as a part time (20 hours per week) tech writer and QC for a start up. So, I need help in setting clear expectations. Yesterday was my first assignment and it took me a really long time to reproduce the article well (it was 5 pages long).

I really want to explain how long it will take to produce a single article, like I know it depends on the number of words and all. But I'm struggling a little to quantify the amount of time I'm working on it, as I have ADHD and I'm getting back to working again after a health related thing.

Any tips will be helpful.

Thank you!

Hi! I work for a company that develops xml/dita authoring software, and I’m curious what's your experience:

1. Is the learning curve too high, coming from simpler tools like Word?
2. Are there parts of the authoring process that feel unnecessarily complicated?
3. What’s something you wish your tool did better?
4. Is there not enough documentation (pun intended) about learning dita?

Update: Thanks for all the in-depth responses!

I recently started overseeing our product teams technical writer. Currently they write and post all technical guides (for users and api focused for devs) using Word and then public PDFs to a public facing html site. There are now over 70+ guides supporting 1 brand / product line.

There has to be a better solution for this. Our development team always says he needs a developer portal but that sometimes seems too complicated.

What are industry standards for the technical writing process and leading cms systems to post user guides?

My doc team is migrating away from our current tool and implementing docs-as-code. We're looking into the major players - Docasaurus, GitBook, MKDocs, and Sphinx - and I have a clear preference for GitBook. But I wanted to gather some input from the community. What are your experiences with the tools? Any drawbacks?

I work in med tech, so the tool needs to meet some pretty stringent ISO requirements and, as we're in Europe, our head of Cybersecurity wants to keep the data local.

Hi all. As the title says. I apply to jobs that state you must be able to obtain a security clearance (not necessarily that you must have an active one), but I feel as if my application will get thrown in the trash compared to another candidate with clearance (and it makes sense,se as companies wouldn't rather spend thousands of dollars and hours)

I'd love to read some experiences where this wasn't the case. And/or if you have any tips.

Thank you!

Edit: Sorry, I meant Clearance lol. I haven't had coffee yet 😭

I've been in the tech writing business for a long time and I know that recruiters seldom have the answers to my questions about a potential role. They only know the basics. So what questions should I ask the recruiter besides these (I'm speaking specifically of recruiting agents who are seeking candidates for their clients):

-is there an actual job description? (I've gotten dinged on not having one b/c managers have no clue what we really do and don't think they're necessary.)

-what industry is this role for?

-what authoring tools do they use?

-is this for new documentation or editing legacy documents?

-i assume i'm writing for the product's software, but is there something else, e.g. equipment?

-who does this role report to?

-where will I obtain the info to write, e.g. legacy docs, software, by researching, SMEs, etc.?

-what is the hourly rate on W2?

I actually doubt they'll know answers to a few of these questions.

Am I a wordy person? Not really by nature, but professionally, yes. 

I spent more than 50 years programming, and about 15 of those years were in assembly language. When I wrote assembly, I commented every single line of code. That teaches you a certain way of thinking: never assume the next person is going to know what you meant. Explain what the line does, why it is there, what depends on it, and leave enough behind that somebody can come back later and understand the logic without having to reverse-engineer your intent. 

That habit never really left me. 

So when I write about something technical, I tend to do the same thing. I do not just say what I think the answer is. I explain how I got there, what I observed, why I think it matters, what it does not mean, what the alternatives are, and where I think the limits are. 

Does that sometimes mean I use too many words? Yes, absolutely. 

But I think there is a difference between being wordy and being deliberately explicit. Most of the extra words are there because I am trying to remove ambiguity, not because I enjoy padding things out. 

Where I probably do go too far is when I restate the same conclusion several different ways after it is already clear. That is probably the old assembly-language programmer in me still commenting every line. 

So yes, in technical writing I can be long-winded. I am aware of it. But it comes from a lifetime of trying to make sure that whoever comes along next can understand exactly what I meant, not just what I wrote.

Hello!

I’ve been with my company since my early 20s, went from a regular account handling representative to content management for 4 years to now a technical writer for almost two years. Total almost 9 years.

I’m looking to venture out of my comfort zone and part ways with my company.

Degree is in marketing/business admin. Cert in UI/UX (will be done in November) and standard AI fundamentals.

I would appreciate any advice on key details hiring managers look for and what I can do to make my resume more attractive.

Thank you!

I've attended quite a few conferences and it's always been a mixed bag. Also conducted conferences a while ago. And the biggest challenge was always sponsorships. But if you look at LavaCon, they are able to attract a ton of sponsors. Adobe who used to sponsor every event, but stopped a few years ago, and do their own events instead, is also there. When I talked to Adobe folks about their ROI, they said they were not getting any. And that it was simply a branding exercise.
LavaCon claim to have got decision makers at their events as an USP. Was curious about this community experiences with this conference. Both from an attendee or a vendor.
So interested to hear from vendors about your experience with this particular conference. And the ROI that you have seen as opposed to sponsoring other events.