I'm belatedly learning this lesson (you'd think I'd have caught on earlier in my career) I very much want to stick to small young startups in future, but there's less demand for tech writers there.
You might have trouble finding opportunities to do this full-time anywhere, but if you could manage the documentation and knowledge base (especially if they're training AI bots internally and to support customers from it) for 3-4 client companies, you might be able to make that work.
Good technical writing is especially important now. I guess you can try to train bots on the codebase itself, but unless that's pretty well documented, I wouldn't expect as much from that as training them on good technical documentation.
Yeah I freelanced for 4yrs before returning to employee-land in 2022. I think I'm going to go back to it eventually, but nervous in the current market.
Either you freelance and work for multiple companies or you add other skills to your portfolio.
For example
- creating videos of your articles/docs
- hosting events like hackathons or meetups
- developing libraries or integrating the product with popular platforms