Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
February/March 2007
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Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter February/March 2007 |
The Bay Area job market for technical communicators is healthy again, and in
some sectors salaries and contract rates are trending higher than during the
best years of the Internet Boom.
Technical communicators with subject matter experience in data security, mobile applications, “triple play” technology (voice, video, and data over internet protocol), open source systems, and network storage will be popular. To a lesser extent the same is true for those with implementer-level understanding of enterprise applications, databases, and telecom and data networking infrastructure. EDA- and hardware-savvy technical communicators may experience a shrinking and more volatile local market for their skills, but will be just as well compensated as the best in other sectors while favorable winds blow.
Seasoned technical communicators who have let their tools or technical knowledge atrophy, or who have long gaps in their work history, will have a tough time regaining their former earning power. For these people, professional seniority can be a curse because many desirable employers seek flexible, do-whatever-it-takes workers who won’t count the hours or make a fuss when promised resources fail to materialize.
Entry-level technical communicators have reason to be optimistic. Although most companies won’t turn to them first, when they do beginners have the advantage of having “fewer bad habits” (as one manager recently characterized the upside of their inexperience) but also lower price tags. They won’t get formal training at most companies, but their enthusiasm and energy is an advantage and they usually get the benefit of the doubt when they make mistakes.
Early in the recovery from the last recession, many companies opted to keep their payrolls lean and hire technical communicators on contract. They wanted to “try before we buy” and needed the option of cutting the contractor loose should the economy falter. With optimism increasing, due not least to huge cash infusions from venture capitalists (tied in turn to heavy merger-and-acquisition activity and the resurgence of IPOs), many of those companies are opting to hire staff (‘captive’) workers and reduce their ‘cash burn rate’. That translates into a preference for salaried workers, albeit often following a short contract stint to evaluate compatibility.
Contracts are still comparatively easy to secure for those with rare skill sets, exceptional track records of dependability, autonomy, and resourcefulness on comparable projects, and first-rate, recent references. We’re seeing rates for API/SDK writers tasked with ‘rescue missions’ hit $85-95/hour, typically 1099 or corp-to-corp. For W2 workers, reduce those numbers by 8-12 percent to offset the client’s employment costs.
More companies are opting to employ contractors on a W2 basis in spite of the increased costs because their CFOs and lawyers have advised hiring managers not to risk contractor-reclassification audits. As a result, unless you’re incorporated or are doing a one-off project unrelated to the company’s day-to-day operations, you’ll likely be required to sacrifice your business deductions and accept a post-tax paycheck. Working offsite on your own equipment, and only showing up for meetings -- even when compatible with the company’s culture -- is no longer sufficient to reassure many bean-counters that you’ll not file for unemployment when the project ends, exposing them to expensive clashes with IRS, FTB, and EDD.
Most technology companies have globalized their workforces, and many technical communications jobs have left US shores -- for Asia, the EU, Russia, Israel, and even Africa -- never to return. However, some offshored work has returned to the Bay Area after employers realized that their cost savings were cancelled out by the need to rewrite content for the more demanding domestic audience.
Local technical communicators have an advantage: they write American Business English better than their foreign rivals. When paired with concerns over theft of intellectual property when product development moves abroad, this advantage will last a few more years -– until Technical Writers in Bangalore and Shanghai and Warsaw learn how to ‘sound American in print’ and international copyright laws get patched.
Synergistech’s advice: if you suspect your job is in jeopardy, use the few remaining years to either a) get more technical, so you can work with more complex products and benefit from the continued demand for engineering-oriented communicators, b) transcend standard technical communications roles by moving into project management, technical training, usability, marcom, regulatory compliance (such as FDA or ISO 900x) documentation, or another audience-dependent role that can’t easily migrate offshore, or c) find work funded by local, state, or federal government.
Bay Area companies compete globally, and labor costs less everywhere else on the planet. This reality will keep pressure on local technical communicators to demonstrate their value. One way Technical Writers, in particular, can convince employers and clients to hire them is to prove that they can do more with fewer resources.
For companies developing multiple products or selling internationally, one compelling way to save money is to implement structured authoring with DITA. An evolution of SGML, DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is a standard for document templates that enforce structure. As a result, companies can more easily re-use their content, manage it centrally, make it tool-neutral, tune it for specific audiences, and distribute it simultaneously in multiple formats and foreign languages, all while reducing production, translation, and maintenance costs.
Technical Writers able and willing to create structured content, and specialists who help companies transform their content from unstructured to XML-based structured documents using XSLT and content management systems will be in intense demand as this trend grows. Interest in this solution is inevitable because the cost savings are so immediate and pervasive.
In the software arena, companies are moving quickly to hire local technical communicators -– Technical Writers, Trainers, Instructional Designers, even Editors -– who demonstrably understand their specific audience and have recent experience with their technology. But they routinely ignore those who don’t, or they hire them offshore.
The message software industry decision-makers are sending to Bay Area technical communicators is that technical subject matter knowledge and audience insight trump other factors affecting who gets hired and what those people earn. Hiring managers want communicators who can create content with little or no input from subject matter experts.
To make the big bucks and survive corporate attrition, it is now insufficient merely to have created similar deliverables using the same tools. To get hired, technical communicators need to know a specific audience’s context, what information it needs, and how both to find that information independently and present it efficiently.
All but gone are the days when technical communicators could ‘come up to speed’ on the job. Not only are subject matter experts more unavailable than ever, but management is more impatient with what they consider vague, irrelevant, and uneducated questions. Companies need for technical communicators themselves to know what to create and for whom to create it. Compounding the problem is that most companies won’t allow communicators to interact with the product’s users.
What can a generalist technical communicator do when he or she lacks an understanding of the subject material or what the audience needs to know? Get educated about what peers have done in similar situations, and clearly communicate your abilities and expectations. Offer choices, discuss tradeoffs, and keep management fully informed. Don’t sulk or get cynical; get practical. If the company could have found a mind-reader with exactly the experience they needed, they would have hired that person instead.