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Comment by epc | Hacker News Reader

Technical writing is dead as a profession.

Too many companies expect technical writers to be as savvy, or more, as their developers, but for lower pay, less respect, and zero political power.

This attitude bleeds through to open source/free software.

You want better documentation? Find a way to compensate people for contributing to it, and that doesn't necessarily mean money. Separate your documentation repository from your code base.

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Afaik RedHat pays their documentation engineers and QA engineers very well, since they consider those roles to be essential to the product from the customer's expectations. It's a perspective rarely shared by other companies though.

> "It's a perspective rarely shared by other companies though."

This is not the worst case scenario. Some places will sensationally hire QA/Writers, hailing their importance, and lay them off at the first sign of cost cutting.

I lost one other recommendation there…you want better documentation? Do not reject documentation which accurately documents problems in your OSS project/product. Rejecting pull requests because they (accurately) document a solution to a problem posed by your product will only guarantee the writer will never submit another documentation pull request.

Not that that's happened to me.

<< Technical writing is dead as a profession.

Hmm, I couldn't disagree more!

<< Too many companies expect technical writers to be as savvy, or more, as their developers, but for lower pay, less respect, and zero political power.

Hmm, I couldn't agree more!

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