Hiring a documentation engineer
Has anyone hired a doc engineer to create and manage a knowledge base? Would love to hear about the experience. Intros and recommendations are also greatly appreciated
Has anyone hired a doc engineer to create and manage a knowledge base? Would love to hear about the experience. Intros and recommendations are also greatly appreciated
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
@Primer If you don’t know, it’s probably better to just not comment.
Also I didn’t invent “documentation engineer” - a quick Google or LinkedIn search will help you find the creator. There are tons of jobs with this title.
Some of us engineering types do get upset about the over use of the word "engineer" in the English-speaking world. No one calls a paramedic a "doctor", but all kinds of people get referred to as "engineers". De-values our profession.
"Technical author" is how I've always known the job you describe, but maybe that's a transatlantic difference. There's a lot of scope within that, depending on what you want documenting. Documenting an API requires a much greater level of technical ability (such as writing code examples) than documenting a UI. These days, if you're also looking for demonstration videos then you have the question of presentation skills, video editing, etc.
Either way, you may need some documentation already - there's a risk with documenting just from experience, that you might document unintended behaviours (especially for an API) that could change in the future without notice.
Totally the thing is the folks filling these jobs are actually engineers. The job descriptions require them to know how to write code just as good as the folks they are documenting for.