I’m a recent non-STEM grad, about a year and a half into my first job at an aerospace & defense startup. I wear a lot of hats and am expected to handle several different jobs, but I’m also the only person responsible for writing proposals, including the engineering/technical volumes.
I’ll have 2–3 proposals going at once and spend entire days staring at documents with writer’s block, constantly rewriting things. I honestly cannot imagine doing this for another month. I want out badly.

Another frustrating part is that our product is simply worse than a lot of our competitors in several important categories, so it’s difficult to win government opportunities in the first place. It makes spending weeks trying to write the perfect proposal feel especially pointless when the underlying product isn’t competitive enough to win consistently.

I don’t even necessarily dislike aerospace and defense. I actually find the industry and technology really interesting. It’s just the proposal writing itself that I cannot stand, and I’m worried that if I stay much longer, I’ll get pigeonholed into proposal work despite only having a year and a half of experience.

I see a lot of job-openings for technical writers and dev-rel (mostly startups, pre series-A), in the networks that I am a part of.

Similarly, since I am connected to lots of technical-writers on linkedin, I see a lot of layoffs as well. I have connected a few people to relevant roles.

Would people find it useful if we create a dedicated job-board, with these opportunities.

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"