How Many Documenters?

[Robotman]

I am one documenter, working just under full time hours on approximately (or should that be conservatively?) 5000-7000 pages of unfinished or half-completed work maintaining about 40 separate manuals from install guides (our work is software development), user guides and various other projects. I am also doing videos too (using Adobe Premiere). At times this can be very stressful, especially close to release.

Whilst we are working towards certain goals to get these completed, it made me think about other Flare users and the situations you are in.

I understand some of you work for yourselves, some work for mid-sized companies (ours is just under 20 employees), some work for corporates but I just wanted to get an idea of what your particular situation is and how many technical writers are in your organisation or how many projects you maintain. I am still reasonably new to the tech writing job (even after 5 years) but I think it might be time we looked into getting other people in as well as the amount of work required to complete these jobs is.... I think too much for one person. But as this is the only job I've had in this profession so I am keen to see if I am handling too much or if this is pretty much standard.

Cheers,

[DocuWil]

Hi Gary,

I know in what situation you are.
I am working now 12 years in my current company, which is not bigger as 15 persons.
Now, in 2 weeks a new colleague is coming.
There is simply much too much work to be done: user manuals, reference manuals, instructions, test protocols, and so on.
The problem is the money of course. After all it is costly to have 2 technical writers in such a small company.
Still, my boss decided to hire an extra person. One of the big reasons: in the long end it brings money, especially with the test protocols. That saves money at the programmer side.
Second, in 6 years I will retire and it takes a lot of time to get someone completely involved.

Don't forget documentation is often the flagship of the company.

[RamonS]

We have one tech writer (and that's not me), but he does end-user docs exclusively (manuals and help). Anything else is either done by QA (mainly from me), trainers, or marketing. A lot of internal documentation is created by business analysts and the product manager. Test plans are sole responsibility of QA, tech specs are created by developers.
So far that works out well for us, but if we ever add more product or revamp our main product line it will be too much work for one person. Even maintenance going forward will take more work than what it does now.
My impression is that a lot depends on how valuable the company considers documentation is and how 'techie' the tech writer is. I came across several technical writers, but there are many that are nothing more than formatters. They have no clue about technology or the product they write about, but they can use Frame and prettify even the worst scratch of text. And sometimes that is good enough if the SMEs provide the content.
So, asking how many tech writers a company has always depends a lot on the company, the product, the documentation expected, and the tech writer. In your case you probably want to seek some assistance, but going from one person shows to a team comes with other issues that need to be dealt with. Make a style guide and continue working on it, have it expand to the product itself as well (wording in messages, etc.), get source control and means to work on a project with more than one person, and get a clear, detailed, and precise requirements document from the product design team. Lastly, treat documentation in the same way as source code and good things will happen.

[empedocles]

I've generally found the so-called "formatters" are paid like formatters, too.

[trent the thief]

We have three full-time writers and I believe we could use at least two more.

I've been a lone writer before in a large company. It's not pleasant unless you can live on diet coke and little sleep. I'm too old for that now
I've also worked in shops with as many as six full-time writers and still had about 3k hardcopy pages and a half dozen help projects of my own, on top of release notes, and other documentation.

Depending on a company's release schedule, you'll soon contemplate taking walk out the window or find another job. It's very frustrating when you can't make something as good as it should be because there is simply too darned much to do.

It's never easy, but I wouldn't do anything else. I've got 20 years in this now and I'll probably die at my desk cursing adobe about framemaker doing something awful to one of my books.

[LTinker68]

... and I'll probably die at my desk cursing adobe about framemaker doing something awful to one of my books.

Not if you switch entirely to Flare.

[trent the thief]

... and I'll probably die at my desk cursing adobe about framemaker doing something awful to one of my books.

Not if you switch entirely to Flare.

Not as long as I need hard copy with serious formatting