The role of a technical writer in an IT company. Implementation of a technical writer in a company

Hello everyone! My name is Ilya, I am a technical writer at QTIM. Today I would like to talk a little about my profession.

This job is not very popular in the IT market at the moment. When I tell someone what I do for a living, many of them hear about this position for the first time and do not understand what I do. Of course, these are people not from the IT world, although I suppose that not all of them have heard of tech writers. Unlike other more popular IT specialties, for which there are a large number of vacancies and various training courses, there are few vacancies in this area on the market, and even fewer courses, and it is quite difficult to find them. When I tried to find out what training is currently available for study and whether there is any at all, I found that such courses are practically non-existent, or provide only basic knowledge, which will not be enough for a full-fledged job. Perhaps there is something good on the market, but unfortunately I was unable to find it.

Many companies do not have a technical writer position, and it is not always clear why this position is needed or whether it is needed at all, so I would like to tell you why it is relevant and can be useful for the company.

To begin with, I would like to briefly tell you what kind of profession this is. In short, a technical writer is an employee who writes technical documentation.

Writers may be involved in writing the following types of documentation:

• for users (user guides)

• for developers

• according to GOST standards

The first type of documentation is user instructions that describe in a language understandable to a person (with any technical level) the operating procedure of a particular application, as well as the procedure for using it. This documentation is necessary for the effective understanding and operation of a product or service, reducing the number of support requests and increasing user satisfaction.

Writing documentation for developers will require a larger set of skills (we will talk about this in one of the following articles). The importance of this kind of documentation is very high. It is intended for a clear and structured description of the code, the structure of models and functionality.

Technical writers who prepare documents according to GOST. This is an exclusively local profession, not in demand outside the Russian Federation. These employees are needed in certain companies that require the preparation of documents according to GOST standards.

Our company has a need to write documentation specifically for developers, since Qtim is engaged in custom development and manages a large number of projects that need to be documented with sufficient quality both to facilitate the introduction of new employees to the project and for the future use of the project by customers and their development team.

Each project has a fairly extensive code base and it is not always possible to ensure its transfer through developers, so our company needed to hire a tech writer.

There are different opinions about the profession and its necessity, I propose to analyze some of them:

1. It is believed that developers should write code documentation because no one can understand the code they have written better than them. Yes, on the one hand, this is true, but based on Qtim's experience, I can tell you that having a technical writer write documentation can have certain advantages. We analyzed the time a technical writer spent on immersing themselves in a project and writing documentation, as well as the saved development time. Thanks to this, we were able to find out that involving a technical writer allows us to save a significant number of development hours, and at the same time receive documentation of sufficient quality in content, written in an accessible language and competently formatted, since the person was focused specifically on writing the documentation, and the developer does not have the opportunity to allocate the same amount of time.

2. Introducing a technical writer into the workflow takes a lot of time and resources. This is true. At the start of my work, I needed to spend time immersing myself in the project, I spent time reading the documentation on the framework, studying videos and articles to immerse myself in the specifics of the development team, the specifics of the language the project is written in, and also communicating with colleagues. After some time, I was able to work productively on projects and eventually began to save time for the team by creating high-quality instructions. It's like investing with the goal of generating income in the future, at the moment you spend, but then the efforts pay off.

3. Many people underestimate the importance of high-quality, well-written product guides, brand reputation, and sales. For example, our company had a situation where the customer was unhappy with the lack of proper documentation for the product provided to them. As a result of my work, I was able to structure the available information, analyze the product, and create technically competent, detailed, and visually more attractive documentation. As a result, the client was satisfied with the quality of the documentation and purchased the product for a fairly high price, and also paid additionally for the documentation services. Thus, the work I did turned out to be quite profitable for the business.

After a fairly short period of time since the introduction of a technical writer into our company, we can already draw conclusions about the benefits that this decision has brought and give some examples from personal experience.

I talked to my colleagues to find out their opinion on the effectiveness of my work. As a result of the feedback, the developers noticed that the documentation now has a uniform format and style, which makes it more understandable and structured, and therefore it is much easier to find what you need in it. They also noted a time saving, since they no longer have to deal with writing documentation.

Developers and managers also note the time savings when onboarding new employees. For example, during the onboarding of a new backend developer, we conducted an experiment by providing him with documentation written by me to speed up his immersion in the project, and compared how quickly the employee began to understand the project using the documentation, compared to previous developers who did not use it. As a result, it was much easier for the newcomer to understand the project, it took him less time than usual, and fewer questions arose, which also reduced the workload for the developers.

Overall, technical writers are essential to companies because they ensure effective communication, regulatory compliance, knowledge protection, increased efficiency, and a positive brand image. They play a vital role in ensuring the success of companies by making complex technical information accessible and usable to a wide range of audiences.

I hope you found this profession interesting to learn about. I would be glad if you shared your experience in the comments, and also tell me if you have a technical writer in your company, and if not, would it be useful to have such a person on staff?