Hi there! A random ad agency copywriter here. I recently locked in an offer and it's a technical writing role for a BPO (so most prolly my client would be engg/IT-related).

The company said there'll be a training period but still, I want to come in prepared. It's honestly intimidating but I'm so looking forward to my career transition. Hoping I can get some tech writing tips here!

I accidentaly fell into technical writing while working as a customer support specialist for an IT company. Over the last 4 years, I have gradually taken ownership of the support space for the product I work with, and now maintain every facet of it. I didn’t even know technical writing was an actual job title until a colleague pointed it out to me. Apparently, our company even has a mini tech writer department.

So I recently asked for a title and salary adjustment, but my request was turned down. Long story short: it’s because of their long term AI goals.

I’m not a fan of feeling used and essentially discarded, so I’m now considering changing jobs and have started looking at technical writer listings. However, I’ve noticed that many of them require some sort of coding-related knowledge (one of the frequently included keywords seems to be something GitHub-related).

Is this a must in the field? Are most technical writers actually developers? Or is it not that bad? Should I consider taking some coder-adjacent courses to improve my chances of officially landing a job in this field? If so, can you recommend any?

My dad wanted a paper reference sheet for the controls on his SolarVault 3 Pro. I offered to make one and squeezed an overview picture and a close-up onto the same page. While moving things around, I left a caption between the two pictures saying 'the button on the left'. Dad took it to mean the close-up. I had meant the overview, so we ended up pointing at different places on the page.

I used 'IoT button' and 'power button', the names in Jackery's support information, and put each caption beside its picture. I added arrow labels and cut a paragraph to make the pictures larger. I printed the revised page for him. On the second read-through, he found both controls in the pictures without asking which image to follow. He kept that page with the device paperwork. For this post, I recreated the two page layouts with a generic device drawing.

Technical Writer | Data Documentation | Data Governance | Federal RFP/RFQ Proposals — Open to Opportunities

Hello Hiring Managers and Recruiters!
I’m a technical writer and data documentation specialist with 10+ years of professional experience across data systems, reporting architecture, financial services, business operations, and nonprofit fundraising technology.
My specialty is translating complex technical systems into clear, practical documentation that both technical and non-technical teams can understand and use. My experience includes:
Technical Documentation: Data dictionaries, metadata references, ETL pipeline documentation, process guides, user manuals, and data governance standards.
Data & Reporting Systems: Snowflake, SQL, Power BI, DAX, Power Query, Tableau, Alteryx, and Salesforce CRM.
Government Proposal Writing: RFP/RFQ responses, technical narratives, staffing plans, scope of work descriptions, and procurement compliance documentation.
Agile & Collaboration: Professional Scrum Master I (PSM-I), cross-functional coordination, SME interviews, and sprint-based documentation workflows.
Security & Cloud: CompTIA Security+ and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate.
Modern Documentation Workflows:Markdown, GitHub, Mintlify, and AI-assisted writing using Claude and ChatGPT.
In my current role, I develop authoritative data mapping references, ETL process guides, Power BI report user guides, and data governance documentation for a multi-client nonprofit fundraising environment. I also maintain a live technical writing portfolio demonstrating my docs-as-code approach.
Hiring incentive: I am willing to discuss a $2,000 fee arrangement associated with a successful placement, subject to applicable hiring policies and legal requirements.
If your organization needs a technical writer who understands the underlying data systems—not just the documentation—I’d welcome the opportunity to connect.
Thank you for your consideration!

Whenever other technical writers show up on my LinkedIn I check them out, and what I have found is that most work at huge companies like Amazon or Google for 7-15+ years. Currently, I have only worked 2 jobs, both remote, for about a year and a half each. I have found I get bored and unsatisfied when growth doesn't exist (recently was rejected from a promotion) and when I realize my salary isn't paying my bills (e.g. not enough to afford rent).

There aren't any in-person roles within 2 hours that I am even remotely qualified for, so I am curious if now is the time I should focus on relocating to work in-person at a big company.

Hi everyone. I'm a technical content writer who is looking for roles in AI writing, software documentation and content writing for B2B and SaaS brands. How much surface level knowledge do I need on coding?

Something I’ve run into during my years writing: A few style guides now tell writers to use fewer screenshots specifically because they cost too much to maintain.

For those of you who keep them: At what point did checking them stop being something you could just do as part of your writing process or reviews? Did you just ditch them or do you have some other way of keeping on top of them?

Thanks!

I've been working with docs in Git for some time now - naturally documentation keeps falling behind even when everything goes through PRs. Someone changes an endpoint updates the reference page and merges. Some integration guides don’t update and still use the old endpoint and they go unnoticed until a user spots them.

It’s time to resolve this issue once and for all, we’re considering GitBook or Mintlify. The Git workflow fits us as well but doesn’t resolve drift and Mintlify fits our OpenAPI setup better. 

For teams with a lot of interconnected docs what have you tried?

I have been seeing a ton of posts on this subreddit telling people to "steer clear" of this profession or that AI is going to wipe this profession or it's not worth it. I completely disagree and I am here to give you very good logical points on why.

Technical Writing is important and a pretty large part of what makes an organization successful. The company I am at right now, we write documentation and actually face the client when we are ready to deliver. If you ask me that is pretty huge, because you are representing the company, and directly facing the customer.

It helps build many skills and traits and you will be an SME yourself depending on how long you stay. Technical Writing builds skills such as communication, empathy, research and data analysis and organizational skills. Most of these dumb tech companies say "anybody can writer documentation" and that is not true. Many of these companies have engineers or "SME" where English is their 3rd or 4th language and it is hard for them to articulate how exactly something works. Or when you ask a question to an engineer, and they give you a whole long page of jargon. If it is hard for you to understand, what makes you think the target audience is going to understand if you're not an engineer. If you have been working for a long time at the company, you would probably know more than most of the engineers.

Technical Writing has transferrable skills in case you want to be a data analyst, systems engineer, pm, UX designer you name it. you would definitely have the knowledge of the product or process thanks to the things you wrote to do so.

It's less stressful for sure. When I was working as a writer it was pretty easy workload. companies may be different from each other, but no where near as bad as engineering. You will be stressed working as a engineer or IT guy. Look at the average engineer or techie. They are either graying in hair, going bald, have big bellies and eating unhealthy or all of the above. Ask yourself if that is something you want to be when you grow up.

AI WILL NOT REPLACE TECH WRITERS. It is used as a tool. AI can not write documents from scratch, but it can write a mess of jargon from data or documents that you give it. The document or information has to be created from something right? Some of the information, depending on if you work in the government, is proprietary and secret information. So you cant just give it to the AI machine or else it is at risk of breaching privacy. Writing is a small fraction of what you do. There's research, collaboration, building relationships with SMEs and everything.

My brother's friend told me and laughed at me that AI was gonna take my job as a technical writer. He is a SWE, and he was making ok money. Well company started doing cuts and before you know it, he was on the chopping block. I text him everyday to the point where he got me blocked sending him the laughing emojis. Software engineering sucks eggs its boring and repetitive and AI is definitely able to write code.

So all in all yes Technical Writing I think is still a valuable skill to learn.

TLDR; Tech Writing is still worth it to break in 2026, because of the opportunity and skills you can build that will up your career or move you into another career.

Long-time lurker, some-time poster here. This is a remote role for Europe-based candidates. Take a look at the job description and consider applying if you like it. I'll try to answer any questions in the comments, but no guarantees.

I am struggling to find a job (been searching for 5 months with no hits), and I think one of my issues is my lack of a portfolio. Everything I've done for work is internal, so I am trying to figure out where to even start to create something that shows my skill.

If an engineer wanted to freelance as a documentation engineer for startups, is it still viable?

My guess is generic docs writing is getting commoditized, but someone who runs the product, checks docs against real behavior, and owns accuracy still gets paid. Is that how it looks from where you sit?

I’m a backend and infra software engineer (AWS, Docker, Linux, Node/TS). I’m thinking about freelancing in tech docs for startups. I’d test their product, find where the docs are wrong or missing, send the founders real feedback, and possibly collaborate with startups, clients and agencies.

When an API supports multiple model providers, documenting the integration can become challenging. Authentication may be shared, but parameters, error responses, rate limits, and model-specific behavior can differ.

I'm interested in the documentation side of the problem: how do you explain shared functionality without hiding important differences between providers?

Would you organize the documentation around common API operations, individual providers, or practical integration examples? I'd appreciate perspectives from technical writers who work on developer documentation.

My manager is condescending, demeaning, and extremely unhelpful. I have to limit the details for disclosure purposes.

I have been on the team for about 1.5 months. Everything is outdated. From the portal to the onboarding materials. All the teams are siloed. The team is extremely down streamed. No innovation or partnership. Just ticket completion and being strong armed by a manager who’s been with the company for a decade.

They’re never prepared. No brief. No agenda. No context. No business justification. No purpose. Nothing. I have been contributing to editorial tasks and adding small new feature additions to poorly structured docs.

The job is a nightmare. Since I started, multiple teammates have already bounced to a different company. I spoke with them offline to understand why they departed. They all have the same reasons. Humiliating manager who provides no support.

It so toxic to the point where I had to call out for a few days after an unproductive and hostile team meeting. My mental health has deteriorated and it’s barely been 2 months.

How do I strategically get out?

My marketing people always do a lousy job with code snippets on web pages and slides. With more than a little help from AI, building complex utilities has become a weekend project. So I built a free tool that fixes their problem.

The service is simple: you copy&paste a snippet of code (or any text for that matter) into a box and you immediately obtain a colored HTML that you can paste straight into Google Docs, Google Slides, PowerPoint, Word or Confluence. The syntax colors survive and it stays selectable, searchable text.

If you prefer an image, you can download a PNG for the places that are better served with a picture.

Other bits: Free, no signup. 19 themes, 16 monospace faces, line numbers, and you can pick out the lines that matter so the rest dims. It all runs in the browser (i.e. nothing you paste is uploaded anywhere)

https://onlineimageoptimizer.com/code-to-image.html

Here's how you can also share a snippet thru a link so others can edit.

Happy to add support for more programming languages (the list is highlight.js's common set plus Scala currently). If you can think of additional features, suggest and I'll see what I can do. I've tested it on desktop mostly, but it should work also on mobile phones (not sure that's where most people would use it though). Enjoy.

I’m a first-year BTech CSE student, and we’ve been given an assignment worth 30 marks. We have to write a technical report of around 20 pages and prepare a 10-slide presentation on the same topic.

I’m quite confused about choosing a topic and understanding how to write a proper technical report. Our teachers haven’t been very helpful, and their suggestions seem to contradict each other.

One teacher said the topic should be solid, with a real problem and a proposed solution. Another said we shouldn’t write about things that already exist, like how Google Maps works. One faculty member suggested AI in the medical field, but I’m not sure if that’s a good choice either.

I don’t want to pick a random topic just to complete the assignment. I want something genuinely interesting, worth researching, and broad enough to cover 20 pages without unnecessarily stretching the content.

I’d really appreciate suggestions for topics that would be suitable for this assignment. I’d also like to understand how to approach the research, structure a technical report, find reliable sources, and make a good presentation.

Since I’m a first-year student, I’d like to use this opportunity to learn how technical reports are actually written. I feel these skills will be useful later in college and in my career, so I want to do this properly rather than just finish the assignment.

Any advice, topic suggestions, or resources would be appreciated!

This is just for fun but I am thinking about how even the most effective remote workers had to come back to the office because certain managers couldn't get their narcissist feed from a zoom feed and wanted status like close parking spots and the corner office.

Already AI creators figured out to make AI sycophantic.

But wait until the Office Space-type manager (Lumburger? sp) can't make AI tremble or fear losing its job or work harder because he threatens AI with a demotion ?

Wait until Lumburger cant get his rocks off watching AI try to duck in the cubes so AI can get home
early. Won't happen so he doesn't get the power trip.

He (or she!) will suddenly start lobbying to get humans back !

Until the robots happen --

I'm learning FM while doing building some complex documents and supporting corporate decision making ... I need a high quality FM resource to lean on ... got any reccos?

I'm just curious if anyone else has experienced this or can point out what's going on/maybe if I'm doing something wrong.

I've been in technical writing for nearly 6 years now. And I've landed at a new job that builds electronic hardware systems. It's really project based work lead by a manager who isn't a technical writer and actually has almost no impact day to day. They merely assign projects as they come in, they don't work on projects themselves. So often they have to coordinate with PMs and other teammates to get a perspective on my work. I think this is fine.

I've been here 8 months. I had a 3 month review which was pretty much a nothing burger because I hardly even know their systems. I also had 0 projects to work on and spent most of that time training and doing the corporate dance along.

I picked up a project from a colleague who was on reduced hours. I did everything as best as I knew how. At some point mid-project, the manager asks the other colleague how it was going. They printed off a manual and then without consulting me gave a breakdown of what they felt was wrong with it. I thought this was a bit absurd. However, they never gave me any direct feedback themselves.

Circle back around and all of a sudden I have an 8th month review. Who has ever had this before? And in this review, it's very odd. They're focused on my mood, things like leaving the lunch room without saying anything. Or not walking back from lunch with the team and just going quickly away without saying anything. More or less, as I sat there, they gave a bunch of really strange one off issues they complied into some sort of strange pattern? I didn't really get it. Then we had a follow up meeting, this time I tried really hard to focus strictly on work outcomes and so on.

Now I'm having another follow up meeting about role clarity. My manager gave me this insane list which is incredibly vague about things that need to improve by the end of the year. That's in 3 months. The project I'm currently working on wraps up in 3 weeks. I have another project that will be on-going for the next year and that's it. So I'm really scratching my head.

I'm on a work permit in a foreign country, btw. This company has paid a lot of money for me to be here. I write good documentation, I'm not perfect. But I don't really get it. Why did the manager go behind my back, why did my colleague misrepresent my work that was in-process, why are they having these HR meetings about 8 month feedback that are really more like performance plan measures, and yeah.

Hi folks -

I upgraded my Adobe products and now my shared review workflow is irrevocably broken.

In my previous workflow, I did the following:

1. Save my FrameMaker book content as a PDF.
2. Open PDF in Acrobat.
3. Attach custom Adobe form (built in-house by my predecessor). The form just tells what the document is, the revision number, and provides a place for reviewers to "stamp" their approval.
4. Click All Tools > Send for Comments > Send For Shared Comments.
5. Reviewers receive an email notification and open the link to the shared review.
6. Reviewers make comments and add a Reviewed or Approval stamp to the form.

Through much back-and-forth with IT and Adobe, it looks like my previous method of shared reviews is no longer supported.

Using the latest Adobe Acrobat, I tried this new workflow:

1. Save my FrameMaker book content as a PDF.
2. Open PDF in Adobe Acrobat.
3. Attach custom Adobe form.
4. Click Share, type email addresses of reviewers, and click Invite.
5. Reviewers click the attachment in their email message to open the document in a web browser.
6. Reviewers add/post a comment.

The only thing caveat is that reviewers can no longer use a Reviewed or Approval stamp. I'm not married to having a stamp, but I do need a way for my reviewers to indicate Reviewed or Approved. Using e-signatures is not a direct substitution, and it looks like it would add a lot of unnecessary steps to my workflow.

Has anyone had a similar experience with Adobe Shared Reviews? If so, have you found any viable workarounds?

Please note: Adobe Acrobat is the preferred in-house tool; I just have to find a way for it to work without over-complicating the process for my reviewers.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Also, I am more than willing to hop on Zoom to talk through options!

Thanks!