
Ask HN: Those who went from programming to tech writing, how did you do it? - justaguyhere
How did you break into tech writing?<p>Are you happier than you were before?<p>Are you making comparable salary? If not, are there any perks (less stress perhaps?) that tech writing gave you which programming didn&#x27;t?
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lizardwalk5
I don't fully fit your target audience but will try to provide info. I was a
tech writer (software) for a number of years but became unchallenged at the
end and so am in my transition to programming. If you have any API programming
experience, I think you would have a good niche documenting for programmers. I
started writing for users, administrators. Then around the end was
transitioning towards API docs.

Not sure if this is relevant now but I found a first job in a newspaper. There
is a trade group, Society for Technical Communication. You might try to
network with them. Each chapter usually has a regular weeknight meeting
(monthly). But membership is not free and usually the meeting is not free.

I was fortunate that my first company was small and treated me as if in a
startup. They gave me a software product, gave me a license for help authoring
tool (RoboHELP) and expected me to figure it out. Right now I'm not sure what
the industry tool is. Some jobs just require using MS Word and some places
have their own in-house help publishing tool. It was handy to edit HTML/CSS
for small issues with the final HTML output (bad nested list formatting
usually).

I'm not sure about the happy part. As a tech writer, I liked having a variety
of things to learn but found after 6 months at a new company, the job would
feel a little stale. The things I liked were having autonomy. But the downside
was typically I was the one person department and usually I wished I had a
team for belonging.

After working over 10 years, I think I felt my salary capped out about mid 70K
(I think that was including bonus and raise for that job). But the main
concern for me was I felt the opportunity for learning significant new things
was capped out and I did not feel ready to be in a retirement mental frame.

These were my observations about differences with release for tech writer vs
developer. On the release weeks I still stayed late but where programmers
might stay until 11p or past 12a, I would typically go home latest about 8 or
9p. At the smaller companies with less process, I still got a bit of stress
during release time b/c I would have to find the product changes that
programmers snuck into the QA build and update the docs for.

At the end, I got a little burnt out b/c during majority of my career, I was
working overtime regularly and doing long commutes but felt like my work was a
necessary evil rather than impactful to the company or the product. So that
has been my motivation to switch over to programming. Overall I think the main
thing I felt wrong with tech writing was I did not feel a lot of job security
because maybe it was not as hard as programming or some product managers
assumed anyone could do it. The exception was when I had one very good tech
writing manager. But if you are strong at selling yourself/marketing within
the company then this is probably less of an issue. Best wishes and I don't
log in here often but if you have any follow up questions, let me know.

~~~
justaguyhere
Thank you so much for taking the time to reply, I was having serious doubts if
my question made any sense at all, as there were no replies.

Could you please talk about the kind of documentation you wrote? Was it always
for the products that your company developed - was it end user manuals or docs
for programmers? I am not sure exactly what I want to write, but at this point
I am leaning towards writing for programmers (as it is more technically
rewarding) than end users. I am also interested in articles like the
priceonomics blog - data analysis and commentary.

It is disheartening to learn that after a decade your salary was capped at mid
70K. This is not the case with programming, I can assure you. Good luck with
your transition - programming definitely can be (and it usually is) stressful,
but it is more rewarding compared to a lot of other careers. I'm done with
stress, that is why I am looking at other options.

~~~
minnca
I also probably don't fit your target audience, but I'm an entry level FAANG
technical writer. I make ~105k (salary + bonus + stock). My more experienced
coworkers make much more than that – in my experience, tech writers definitely
don't cap out at 70k (far from it!).

~~~
justaguyhere
sorry, just saw this comment.

Could you please comment on the type of documentation that you write on a
daily basis?

~~~
minnca
I write developer docs (internal).

