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by eru 271 days ago
> I used to think it was standard to have English-focused professionals helping UI teams to deliver easy to understand products, only to find out that that company was kinda odd in that regard, [...]

Which is a bit of a shame, because English/Language-majored people's time is cheaper than techies' time.

Google is another outlier in a related way: they have dedicated tech writers to produce internal documentation.

3 comments

> English/Language-majored people's time is cheaper than techies' time.

Which is odd, because it's harder to communicate unambiguously in English than it is in code.

Compensation ain't about how hard something is in an absolute sense. At least that's only one part of it.

Playing an instrument is harder than being a code monkey. On the one hand, you can make good money being a top tier musician, there's almost no money in being a mediocre musician (or even an above average one). On the other hand, it's fairly easy to get by as a mediocre code monkey.

Even as a somewhat subpar software engineer, you can make enough money that you don't have to be waiting tables as your day job.

(Waiting tables itself is a good example at least to contrast with acting or making music or writing novels. None of these aspiring artists and poets is necessarily any good at waiting tables, but it still pays the bills compared to even pretty good acting skills.)

It would be nice if they employed some of those dedicated tech writers for external documentation (sorry for the snark, couldn’t help it)
> they have dedicated tech writers to produce internal documentation

The trick with tech writing is retention!