Totally agree with you (and Mark Jung) about entering without the legacy of experiences in an outdated marketplace. A couple of your recent articles have really resonated with me. This one, the “MySQL CEO, Is it dangerous to hire somebody who has too much experience”, and “Google CEO’s advice, stay engaged …” in particular. We need articles like this.

As a someone who has been around the technical writing field longer than most I do sometimes wonder if I am past it, as it were. I know that I don’t pick up on technology as fast as I once did, but my attitudes and work practices are changing as well. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy working with start-up companies so much. It keeps me thinking.

Cab Sav

Keep in touch,

Min, on behalf of the iinnovate team.

Thanks for visiting my site. I think your site looks really great, especially with the abundance of visual content. Thanks for showing us the cool ways to use Rockyou — I just added it to my latest podcast at Tech Writer Voices.

Putting a lot of visuals on a blog is important regardless of the theme. Most popular blogs are visually rich.

Blogs can be use for a variety of purposes. While they started out as journals, they have morphed into one of the neatest social collaborative tools for professionals as well. Since I’m in technical writing, it’s natural that I’ve chosen this as my theme.

Your point about technical writing being boring was a hotly discussed topic on this blog a while ago.

Thanks for commenting. The academic situation does seem problematic. I know several people who have said similar things about their academic preparations for technical writing — mainly that it didn’t prepare them. Part of the problem is the rapidly changing tool base. I also agree that users are getting more tech savvy, and we no longer have to explain simple tasks like printing.

I think Jung’s point was not so much that new grads are entering the marketplace with a fresh set of needed skills, but that they’re entering without the legacy of experiences in an outdated marketplace.

The biggest case in point is open source. Ten years ago, it would seem ludicrous to give away your software for free. If your experiences taught you that what’s free is treated with little value, or that giving away your product and intellectual property for free would not result in profit, then that experience might not serve you well in embracing an open source model today.

Yet all kinds of corporate open source software projects are succeeding. Jung says the new grad with the fresh slate may be more apt to succeed because he or she would be more likely to embrace something radically new. The people with 30 years of experience may be too tied to following their past experiences.

I agree with you re the changes in technical writing, and a lot of these changes are coming about because 10-20 years ago computers were still not part of everyday life, as they are now. For example, once you had to tell people how to print something, because most people didn’t know how to. Now all you have to say is “Print” (effectively).

I’m not sure that I agree with Jung’s original comments, though, that someone coming out of an MBA has an advantage. Or in the tech writer’s case, any degree.

A couple of years ago I completed a MA (Professional Writing). A big component was electronic and technical writing, and to be honest a lot of what they were teaching was already out-of-date. The things we were doing at work were far more leading edge, and yet the course had only been going three years when I started.

I felt sorry for anyone who did the course full time, because these students were learning old methods and they did not have the advantage of practical experience to show what had changed.

CabSav
(delurking, I think this is my first comment on the site. Hi.)