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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29502
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29502
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Technical writing is a three legged stool. To do it well and efficiently, you need three things:

- Sufficient knowledge of the user's task to figure out what they need to know and how to communicate it to them.

- Sufficient knowledge of the technology to figure out how it works and what you need to say about it, and to ask the developers the right questions.

- Sufficient knowledge of writing and publishing to actually create a comprehensible and usable work. 

Can organizations find tech writers with all three of these skills? Often they cannot, therefore they often have to settle for only one or two.

Do organizations all understand that technical writing is a three legged stool? No, sometimes they just want someone to do the words or someone to make the document look pretty.

Organizations who don't know that they need all three legs of the stool will careen from one communications disaster to another until they figure out that they do need all three. Then they will face the problem that it is very difficult to find a person with all three, especially for the salary they are willing to pay.

At that point they have to decide which of the three they can manage without. This will depend on the product and the market. If they are delivering a consumer product, the first leg is actually pretty easy, so they may focus on the other two.

If the market is highly technical, they may focus more on the first leg.

If they are desperately pressed for developer cycles in their production process, they may focus on the second leg in order to minimize the time that tech comm takes away from their development schedule.

Because of these different reactions to the scarcity of people with all three skills who are willing to work for the wages offered, you can get a job with only two, or sometimes only one of the three legs, but different opportunities will be open depending on which legs you have.

And, of course, both the first and second legs are more or less specific to particular industries. You can be have exemplary task knowledge of accounting software, for instance, but be entirely unsuited to tech writing for medical devices.

In short, it depends. Technical writing is not a generic commodity and you can be eminently qualified for one job and hopelessly unqualified for another.

Original score: 2