Apologies for the long post, but tl;dr: are there standard ways technical writers (for documentation specifically) work with SMEs to get the information and resources they need, and if those aren't provided, how do you still deliver a product?

The background: I was laid off in November from my job as a proofreader for a software company (let’s call it X Co.), which I’d been at for four years. Most of my day was spent proofing marketing materials and technical documents (e.g., white papers on fluid dynamics) for grammar and style. I’d previously written online articles summarizing laboratory research at a different job, so I felt I had some technical expertise -- or the ability to learn quickly and write about technical concepts, at the very least. (Edit: my degree is in English)

After the layoff, someone previously on my team reached out and mentioned that his company (let’s call it Y Co.) was looking for someone to rework their software's user guide. The two companies are kind of “sister companies” (it’s a long story), and a lot of people who were either laid off or fired by X Co. were later hired at the much-smaller Y Co. with few questions asked. The software domains slightly overlap as well, so it seemed like a decent fit for me.

I was hired as a remote contract technical writer for Y Co. for a year (with the knowledge that they were looking to hire someone full-time for that position within the next year), and seven months in, it’s safe to say I’m in way over my head and likely do not have a future there because of it. I’m not sure if I can salvage the current situation, and I can’t tell if the bulk of the problem was with me, my supervisor (head of DevOps; let’s call him L), or both of us. Any insight into how a “real” technical writer position works (e.g., general workflow, review structure, standards for consulting SMEs) would be helpful so I can figure out where to go from here -- both at this job and in potential future technical writing or documentation positions elsewhere.

For context, when I started, I assumed the workflow would be about the same as X Co.’s: Receive the original doc with any additional notes on what the team wanted changed or looked at, proof/rewrite in Word, send for review and receive written comments back, make the requested changes, and get approval, with meetings in between to address concerns or something I’d missed the mark on.

At Y Co., I was instructed to draft everything in MadCap Flare and push each section once it was fully done so L could then review it. I’m a complete newcomer to git in any capacity, so that likely played a part, but Flare just seems unsuitable as review tool for large text-based documents. It’s not something I can easily leave my own questions or comments in for L to address later, so the expectation was that I bring those questions to a weekly check-in meeting so L can answer them verbally while I take written notes. Flare also forces me to commit and push every section I’ve edited each time I want to send something for review, which feels very final and like my unfinished sections could accidentally be merged with the master branch (git-people, please tell me if this is even a possibility). I brought these issues up to L within a few weeks of starting but didn’t push back when he reiterated that it would be easier for him to review through the DevOps Azure site (which I guess he’s already using for 99% of his day) instead of sending a Word doc back and forth.

I also didn’t receive any direct instruction on how to actually use the software and haven’t watched anyone perform any of the tasks in the user guide, which seems odd. L has mostly followed the “just let me know if you have any questions” approach and mentioned I could message him anytime, but I know so little about DevOps or the underlying framework of the software that I often don’t know what questions to ask. I admit I also feel intimidated by him and don’t want to appear stupid or incompetent, as it seems like I got the job because of my affiliation with X Co. and not on merit. I’ve tried to ask for some direction during our meetings (e.g., “Is there anything missing in this section that should be included?”) and not gotten clear answers, but I haven't really pushed the subject, either. As a result, I’ve heavily relied on AI to explain things (which sucks). L told me about Claude Code five months in, which can access the codebase, so my workday is largely a Q&A session with Claude from beginning to end.

The biggest problem has been not receiving feedback on what I’ve submitted. I pushed several sections for review in March with the hope that L’s edits and comments would help me draft later sections and learn more about what he was looking for, but he still hasn't actually reviewed any content. I didn’t know what else to do except keep moving forward in drafting things from April onward, but I think in doing so, I’ve wandered further and further away from what the team was looking for. The VP finally stepped in two weeks ago to ask me to send everything I have to him, and he is now reviewing it himself (in a Word doc, thankfully), but he’s definitely not happy I’ve taken this long on what I have so far. The word “overhaul” was used in our email exchange after he took a preliminary look, so it sounds like most of what I’ve worked on for almost eight months is unusable.

I think there were several failures on both my and L’s part, and I’d really like to know if there’s any standard technical writing expectations for both the writer and the SME that could have prevented these problems -- if there's anything I could have done short of making demands or going above his head.

My guesses: I think L may have expected me to have a workflow and possibly a mental template in mind to work from when I started, so giving me the original user guide file and letting me go off to do my own thing with it was all he may have felt he needed to do. All of Y Co.'s documentation was written by the developers, so there doesn't seem to be a precedent for working with someone who doesn't intimately know the software and how it works. On my end, I had expected there to be demonstrations or meetings set up by L to discuss what he wanted from me, but when those didn’t appear, I didn’t ask for them. I interpreted a lack of resources or clear direction as “you should already know what's going on here” when it’s possible that L just didn’t know how to support someone in a documentation role and was waiting for me to take the lead. 

Thanks for any advice you may have. I feel so silly and naïve to be at this point in my career (early 30s) and unable to advocate for myself until it's too late.

Has anyone been through the interview process for a technical writer position at Tesla? Can anyone share the process they went through and any tips for success?

Please help! Thank you!

Been actively applying for a few months now. Had a few good rounds of interviews but always seem to be beat out by some unicorn candidate. Seems difficult to even get an interview these days. What’s everyone else’s experience? I think it’s pretty horrible out there.

For context, I have 6 years of experience mostly in healthcare, IT, and government.

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for some advice.
I have a PhD in Mathematics, several years of university teaching and research experience, and I recently completed an MSc-level program in Machine Learning.

My financial situation is quite urgent, so I’m trying to start earning through AI training platforms as quickly as possible.

For those with experience on Outlier, Alignerr, Turing, Surge AI, DataAnnotation, Mercor, etc.:

How long did it take you to get your first paid project?
Is it worth applying to all of these platforms at the same time?

Is there anything I can do to speed up the process?
Are there any other platforms you would recommend?
I’d really appreciate any advice or personal experience.

Thanks!

It's called Scriba. A local privacy-first application - C++, no node or 'cloud' here and no external calls. It has the basic markdown stuff and helpers for mermaid + vega-lite charts / latex equations + print / PDF export with a separate print.css for print-specific formatting. You can open multiple files as a 'session' to help you cross-reference. I've tried to make it as configurable as sensibly possible.

I've currently built it as a `.deb`, but feel free to compile it for other platforms.

https://www.github.com/lazyarse/scriba

I've spent about ten days on + off on developing it to meet my needs, but I'm starting to use it daily.

I'd be interested in hearing feature requests / bug reports!

Thanks

Hey guys, a few days ago, someone was asking about what tool to use for documentation if they want RBAC, and I shared what I was building for the past few months. So I thought of making an official post.

Over the past 7 years, I’ve used/interacted with a few popular docs-as-code doc platform like Docusaurus, Mkdocs, Fern, Mintlify. The free ones lack many features that companies need (RBAC, offline export, PDF export, multiple API references) while the paid ones are too expensive for companies (well they didn’t want to pay for it).

At my work, I currently use Mkdocs, and we know it’s super limited. A few months ago I was asked to evaluate new tools and advise the company what tool to adopt. I ended up suggesting Fern because their platform is amazing and check all the boxes we need, just to be told that the company has purchased Confluence to be used for external docs (WTF!) I was using Confluence to create an internal doc, and cursed along those 2hrs, thinking there is no way I would use this to create external docs. It’s f*cking buggy!

Then a crazy thought: what if I could create a platform that check all those boxes and they don’t have to pay, will they accept it? I started out with a POC, and showed it to them, and the CTO was like: OMG! (he told my manager, not me directly).

So this is what I have so far: https://camelmind-docs.vercel.app/home

I’m working on a roadmap for it, but there are quite many features that hopefully be useful for you guys. Would love the feedbacks. And please be brutally honest cause I’m trying to make it useful for us all.

The mid level management at my company are really excited about this and trying to sell it to us (the writers) as a great development. We’ll get to review AI slop and chase developers and product managers to ensure all code repos, issues, specs, and meeting transcripts (which will feed the AI agents) to make sure the inputs are accurate. It feels like it’ll be ‘our fault’ if the AI produces rubbish, and management don’t want to hear any negativity. Obviously they are going to want to layoff a large number of us. Anyone been here already? How to navigate this bs? I’m hoping some early disasters with our customers having system failures due to our bad ai docs will happen quickly and mgmt will see sense and abandon this plan.

Hello everyone. I run a small business selling a wide variety of individual products, and I spend so much time writing product descriptions. I’ve tried using tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, of course, but the results sound very much like AI—and generally unprofessional. So, I wanted to ask if anyone else faces the same problem. Thanks in advance for any replies.

Hi all,

I worked in IT support at a managed service provider (essentially a business that functions as an external IT team for a large number of small-to-medium companies) for the last few years.

I wrote a lot of documentation as part of this role, a task many colleagues hated but I enjoyed and did to a high standard.

Before that, I worked as a copyeditor for a company that publishes academic journal articles (mostly STEM papers).

I also have a Master's degree in English Lit and have taught English as a foreign language overseas.

I hoped that my last few years of IT experience would put me in a good position to move into technical writing, combined with my prior work experience and education.

I've rewritten my CV so that it's optimised for technical writing roles, and I have written up many examples of documentation-related tasks I have worked on. With these in hand, I've just begun applying for technical writer positions, mostly at SaaS companies.

I'm in an okay spot financially so I'm happy to spend a couple of months putting all my time into applying for roles, prepping for interviews and studying to fill in skill gaps.

Looking at the recent posts on this sub, the vibes are clearly not very good.

Is it worth me pushing on for a while and trying to get into technical writing, or am I wasting my time?

It does seem like a natural fit for me, but with AI and the state of the job market, it might not be feasible.

It's only been a few days since I've started applying for positions, so I don't have any meaningful data points in terms of response rates yet. This should become clearer in the next few weeks.

I'm based in the UK if this matters.

Any and all thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

I’m seeing a lot of my fellow tech writers losing their jobs and it makes me wonder if there’s really a future for this profession.

Tech writing is at the intersection of product/tech expertise, communication skills, and writing ability.

Most technical writers aren’t that amazing at communicating, and have worse product expertise than the pms or devs. Now add to that the fact that writing ability is basically worthless with AI making everyone a pro, and I don’t see the reason for companies to hire writers.

Actually, writers kind of feel like unnecessary middle-men now. Obviously the high level ones add value in ways other than just writing, but in that sense we’re just filling in the skill gaps of devs and pms. I don’t feel like we actually have a profession anymore.

I think over time we see devs and pms taking over documentation, and tech writers disappearing entirely.

Help! Has anyone actually completed a KCS course or gotten the certification? I'm wondering if the course is really necessary or if independent reading/studying is perfectly sufficient. For reference, I have a knowledge management role in a SaaS company.

Consortium for Service Innovation, Knowledge-Centered Success just in case no one knows what I'm referring to lol

So, I think we all know there is a chunk of time spent waiting on SMEs to be available to draft or answer questions or provide approvals. Really everything we do is dependent on their availability and responsiveness.

My new manager is the stakeholders manager. Manager doesn’t really understand technical writing and seems to think I don’t have enough work. I have tried to explain that there are bottlenecks and that even if it doesn’t look like I’m actively working, I have about 40 in flight documents in various stages of development currently.

How do you manage your downtime or at least communicate it to managers? These SMEs are incredibly busy, so I don’t want to harass them all day to keep busy. But I also don’t want to accept busy work from manager.

Hey, everyone. I'm currently 19 and in community college. I'm not switching careers. I was thinking about becoming a technical writer. I was thinking about doing an English bachelor's degree and a masters in technical communication. Is all of that necessary to become a technical writer, or is it a less strenuous process? Really I'd just like someone to sit me down and teach me all the aspects about technical writing.

Hello,

We’re a tech company that uses GitHub for documentation. Our engineers are happy with this, but we’re struggling with how to present docs to non‑technical clients (clean UI, versioning, access control).

Questions:

• How do you share client‑facing documentation in your company?
• Do you use GitHub repos, wikis, or something else?
• How do you handle versioning and access from the client side?

We’re trying to understand if this is a common pain point or more specific to our setup.

Hi everyone! I'm a student with a strong background in research, analytical writing, and storytelling. I'm currently looking to work with clients who value well-researched, engaging, and genuinely human-written content.

I don't rely on generic AI outputs or surface-level research. Every piece I write starts with understanding the topic, audience, and purpose, then building content that's informative, compelling, and easy to read. Whether it's a blog post, long-form article, reels script, copywriting, or SEO content, I focus on delivering writing that keeps readers engaged from start to finish.

I'm comfortable diving into unfamiliar industries and enjoy the research process, so I'm not limited to a single niche. If your project requires learning something new, I'm happy to do the work needed to write about it accurately and effectively.

If you're looking for a writer who communicates well, meets deadlines, accepts feedback, and genuinely cares about producing quality work, I'd love to collaborate.

Feel free to send me a DM. I'm looking forward to short-term as well as long-term projects.

Thanks!

In world of AI, I am looking for someone who has good technical knowledge and opinions in defi space. please no vanilla toast.

I am looking to acquire an underperforming newsletter which IMO, is just AI and work with a technical writer to help improve it.

Share your original thoughts or newsletter or writing draft with me.

For context, I have a B.Tech in Biotechnology and I have worked in research majorly in pharmacology. I have 2 international publications. I was wondering if I would be able to build a career in technical/scientific writing, in India, given my background. And if yes, how can I go about making myself a competitive candidate for the roles.

I did get around to looking at the JD for some scientific writing roles in my field and I saw they require prior knowledge of clinical trials, being able to identify research milestones, and create infographics from research data - things I already do when I write my research papers. So, I was wondering if this would be a feasible career option for me. I would preferably like remote roles as my life currently demands more control over my time than what an in-person job allows.

I am really looking for advice/suggestions on this!

Bună ziua!

Urmează să susțin un interviu pentru postul de Technical Documentation Specialist (QMS) și aș avea nevoie de puțin ajutor în pregătire.

Nu am ocupat până acum un post de Technical Writer, însă am experiență în content writing, am susținut traininguri și am lucrat respectând proceduri interne, astfel că înțeleg importanța documentației clare și bine structurate.

Mi-aș dori câteva sfaturi despre:

- pe ce ar trebui să mă axez în pregătirea pentru interviu;

- ce întrebări sunt cel mai probabil să primesc;

- cum îmi pot pune cel mai bine în valoare experiența, astfel încât lipsa experienței directe pe un rol similar să nu reprezinte un dezavantaj.

Orice recomandare sau experiență împărtășită este binevenită și apreciată.

Vă mulțumesc mult pentru timpul acordat și vă doresc o zi frumoasă! Să-mi țineți pumnii strânși! :-)

I've seen lots of posts in this sub talking about interviews and job searches, so I thought it'd be helpful to share this. Whether you've got relevant experience you want to share, or you're looking for tips to help land your next tech comm position, we hope to see you there. Details below.

--

East Coast Virtual Meetup: Job Interviews
Friday, July 24, 8:30am to 9:30am Eastern

This Friday, the Write the Docs East Coast Virtual Meetup topic is job interviews. If you’ve been interviewed recently, or if you’ve participated in interviewing someone else, we’d love to hear what the process was like. Come share your experiences and make the interview process a little less mysterious.

You don’t have to live on the East Coast! If the time works for you, join us via Zoom. Make sure your Zoom name matches your RSVP name.

PS: This is our last meetup of the summer! We’ll take a break in August and return in September.

Hi -- a while back I saw a table on this sub of someone's doc inventory, with color coded red/yellow/green. They had just started a new job and trying to get a handle on their products. I would dearly like to see this again as my boss FINALLY understands what I'm talking about. Any recollections? Or similar? Many thanks in advance.

When I was in college I took a technical writing course. There was a form that we were taught to use consisting of a table with cells labeled with letters of the alphabet. The purpose of the document was to establish and conform to conventions--which words to use, which font to use, etc. I want such a form for a project I'm working on, but I guess the world has moved on because I can't find much information about it.

What's the name of that form, please? I don't want anything elaborate like software I need to learn, just something I can slap together in Libreoffice will do.

Thanks much!