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I'm belatedly learning this lesson (you'd think I'd have caught on earlier in my career) I very much want to stick to small young startups in future, but there's less demand for tech writers there.

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Startups need tech writers very much, but only at a certain size you can do it full time at one company.

Either you freelance and work for multiple companies or you add other skills to your portfolio.

For example

- creating videos of your articles/docs

- hosting events like hackathons or meetups

- developing libraries or integrating the product with popular platforms

You might have trouble finding opportunities to do this full-time anywhere, but if you could manage the documentation and knowledge base (especially if they're training AI bots internally and to support customers from it) for 3-4 client companies, you might be able to make that work.

Good technical writing is especially important now. I guess you can try to train bots on the codebase itself, but unless that's pretty well documented, I wouldn't expect as much from that as training them on good technical documentation.

Yeah I freelanced for 4yrs before returning to employee-land in 2022. I think I'm going to go back to it eventually, but nervous in the current market.

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