Re: No wonder Borland Technical Documentation stinks

"Charles Line" wrote

mostly nonsense I'm afraid. Speaking as a developer with several years
experience as a professional tech writer, this is exactly the ad I want to
see from Borland.

"Research material without written technical specifications"

What does this mean? Are there swathes of material requiring documentation
that have no technical specifications? Is is a free-for-all?

It means the same for a technical writer as it would mean for a programmer:
that a very senior hire should be expected to be capable of greenfield
design and production, not just filling in and refactoring material that
others have already produced. Thas ad is for a TW 4 with 8+ years
experience. The person hired should be able to interact directly with the
lead code architects and analysts/developers and understand what they say
(which is that the ad says: "Collaborate with other team members, QA
engineers, R&D engineers, and Product Management"), and not expect things to
be handed to them.

"Produce clear, accurate, and well-organized documentation that requires
minimal editing with minimal direction"

Again, this is a tech writer IV position--a senior/leadership hire. Would
you prefer they hire someone who can't be trusted to produce production
quality work? Would you hire a senior/team-lead programmer who couldn't
produce production quality code without continual supervision and review?

In other words..

"Here's your desk. Here's the code. Now get on with it and I don't
want to hear from you again until it's finished"

Go back to the 'Collaborate..." sentence. You're making this stuff up. The
ad clearly says nothing of the kind.

And actually the ad description makes it look like DevCo is moving in the
right direction: towards agile development by cross-functional teams that
get tech writers and test engineers in working with R&D directly and from
the beginning. That's excellent.

This does not fill me with confidence, especially as the quality of
documentation is what causes me greatest frustration with what comes out
of
Borland.

Actually this is exactly the caliber person that Borland /should/ be hiring:
some one whou can come in to an agile team and be an impact player. And the
fact that they're advertising the position while making layoffs elsewhere
may indicate an increased sense of the importance of documentation. It's had
to see that as anything but good news.

bobD


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