How to Hire Your First Tech Writer

I’ve been a tech writer for several years before switching to a management job. Having been both tech writer and manager, I’ve built a strong vision of what a good tech writer should be able to do. I’m writing this vision down in the hope that it will help companies who don’t have a dedicated tech writer in their team but plan to hire one make the right choice.

So, what does a tech writer do? Manager manages, programmer programs, so writer must write, right? Well, not exactly. Of course, strong copywriting skill is a must, but technical writing covers a much larger area than just creating copy. My experience tells me that if you’re hiring a writer solely to write, you’d rather teach your developers to write instead.

First, you can’t write any decent docs without interviewing developers and managers. You must have strong social skills to get the information you need without making people hate you. It’s a stressful job that requires patience, modesty, and skill.

Second, what good are docs no one uses? Writing the copy is just the first step of making the docs available to the team. It’s the writer’s job to discover, set up, and maintain the right tools for documentation creation and distribution. That includes undertanding continuous integration and delivery, hosting, and programming when necessary.

Third, in a big enough company, no matter how many writers you have, it won’t be enough unless everyone writes the docs. It’s the writer’s job to educate the team about writing quality docs and persuade the management that creating a culture of documentation is better in the long run than hiring more writers.

To recap, your first tech writer must:

• write condensed, grammatically and technically correct copy;
• communicate well;
• use terminal freely, program when needed;
• educate, evangelize, and build the culture of creating documentation.