The intro touches on something I learned to be true very early in my technical writing career, but which isn't discussed much and may not be widely known:<p>> helping to push forward all sorts of efforts around knowledge-sharing at Jane Street<p>As a TW I often find myself advocating for more scalable/sustainable/permanent ways to store institutional knowledge. The classic example is email. Sometimes there is extremely useful knowledge buried in an email thread. I often work with engineers (or whoever) to turn that knowledge into publicly searchable documentation.<p>P.S. tangentially related to the title of this post, my brother came up with a fun self-deprecating joke (which I later used on as a tagline [1])<p>> Technically, I'm a writer<p>[1] <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome/</a>
I listened to some of this today and it's really great. Lots of similar learnings as has been had from the g3doc team at Google.<p>More information available here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnB8GtPuauw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnB8GtPuauw</a>
I think a lot of companies would benefit immensely if they hired a few tech writers. Management always talks about collaboration and knowledge sharing but they refuse to put money behind this desire. Instead it’s up to the workers to create documentation while also having to finish project deadlines. And most developers don’t really enjoy writing or are good at it.