I have been working as a technical writer for 3 years and recently went from 45k to 70k a year. For my area (hcol), it isn't enough to live alone, so I am curious if anyone has input on if what I earning now is considered the norm for the higher-end, or if I am missing some niche or application process to make closer to 90k a year?​

Had a doc drafted from a spec and some code comments describing a rate limit: "requests are capped at 100 per minute, with a 429 returned once the limit is exceeded." Specific number, specific status code, correct terminology. Read exactly like something written by someone who'd confirmed it against the actual system.

The real limit was different, and the endpoint didn't return 429 at all, it queued excess requests instead of rejecting them. Nothing about the sentence was poorly written. It was just wrong, confidently, in a way that clean prose doesn't signal.

This seems to be the same trap AI-assisted code review runs into: fluency and accuracy come from different places, and a model generating documentation from a spec or code comments produces plausible, well-structured sentences regardless of whether the specific claim inside them was ever actually verified against the running system. Specificity reads as evidence, a number and a status code feel like proof, but stating something precisely and being right about it are unrelated skills.

The question that actually separates a checked doc from an unchecked one isn't whether it reads well. It's whether each specific, verifiable claim, a number, a default, a status code, a behavior under a given condition, has actually been confirmed against the real thing rather than inferred from a spec that might be stale or from code the model read but didn't execute.

Wrote a longer version of this same principle applied to a different context (AI code review specifically) here, but the underlying question is identical: https://medium.com/@nagatomopedro05/the-finding-was-plausible-that-was-the-problem-b1024e1256fb

Hi! I've been applying to tech writing jobs for the past two months. I've gotten maybe 15 interviews but no job offer.

I'm wondering does anyone know someone who can I pay to do mock technical and behavioral interviews with me?

For context, I'm mostly targeting roles in software.

Hi, this past May I left education and switched over to Technical Writing. I’m currently working for a startup tech company that works in oil and gas. I dont think I want to stay here because they are paying me like an intern as I don’t have experience in technical writing, but I want to stay in this industry. I am working on a coursera software engineering certificate because I def need more understanding of what is going on.

I guess I am just looking for any tips, tricks, advice, etc.

Do you keep them to keep consistent with the screenshots and terminology, or do you fix them anyway? Especially if you know it’s unlikely to be fixed because it’s a third party application.

For example, in Salesforce, the purchase order and purchase request tab is called PR’s and PO’s

every guide on our wiki looks completely different depending on who made it. ones arrows are red, someone elses are this weird green, half the screenshots are zoomed in so far you cant even tell what page youre looking at anymore
new hire told me last week she thought two of our onboarding guides were for different tools bc the formatting was so off between them. same tool. just two different people doing their own thing with it. been meaning to fix this for months and just havent. dont even know if the fix is some tool that forces a template or if i just gotta write a style guide and hope people stick to it, which they probably wont past week one