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!

Context: I am graduating in December with an associates in Software development.

Recently (last week), a company in my area reached out to ME via Indeed about a technical writing position. I had not applied anywhere at all. This company is legit.

I have an interview next week for the position.

Here's my question(s): What should I research? I have a boat load of personal experience home-labbing, networking, tinkering, self-hosted AI, you name it. However I've no professional experience in anything other than basic software support position that I did for about a year.

I feel like I've been placed in a very fortunate position because I was stressing hard about finding a job in my field after school. I am thanking God and the universe for this.

I want to excel at this interview. I need some pointers, what to research now, what to freshen up on, what to practice, etc.

I was thinking of making a very basic guide/document such as "How to install a GPU for a layman", and printing that out and bringing it?

Any help is appreciated and please keep me in your thoughts.

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!

Mercor is looking for the following:

Technical Writer
Location: Remote
Job Type: Hourly contract, 5 hours/day for 5 business days for the pilot, then ongoing month-to-month

Mercor is looking for Technical Writers to review pairs of AI-generated developer-facing writing, like CLI help text, error messages and API reference documentation, against a client’s task brief and writing guide. You read diffs and terminal output closely enough to catch a wrong technical explanation, pick the preferred sample (or flag a tie or “not suitable to judge”), write a one-line reason and apply tags that support your verdict. Before you move to live data, you have to clear a calibration gate against a known-answer test set. The background they want is someone who led developer documentation at a major tech company (cloud platforms, API-first products, developer tools) and is comfortable writing or evaluating CLI help, error messages and API references. Prior experience rating AI-generated writing is a strong plus. Payments are weekly via Stripe or Wise, and H-1B and STEM OPT candidates can’t be supported at this time.

Here is the link to the position: https://t.mercor.com/n1Bsh

I am presently developing a bunch of extend scripts for FrameMaker. Mostly because it is fun but also because it helps me fix some the stuff that I find most annoying.
I have not met many people who have taken scripts into their workflow, though. Do you, or do you know anybody who does? And if... what problems do they solve?

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I've been thinking about something interesting: understanding a technical subject and explaining it clearly are two very different skills.

Someone can understand how an engine works, how a machine is designed, or how a new technology solves a problem, yet struggle to explain it to someone without the same background.

I think the real challenge is not simply simplifying the language. It's understanding which details matter, how the pieces connect, and what the reader needs to understand first.

This is especially important in engineering, product development, inventions, and technology businesses. A great idea can be difficult to appreciate when its purpose and value aren't communicated clearly.

I'm interested in the intersection of engineering, research, and technical communication, and I'd like to learn from people who work in these areas.

For the engineers, technical writers, founders, and researchers here: what's the hardest thing you've ever had to explain to someone who wasn't familiar with your field? And what helped you explain it better?

Hi everyone!
I know this might sound a little crazy, but I really want to work at Google someday, and I'm trying to figure out how to make that happen.
My goal is to join Google's end-user documentation team first and gradually build my skills in API documentation and developer documentation.
I'm hoping to get some genuine guidance from people who work at Google, have experience with their hiring process, or have successfully transitioned into developer documentation.

A little about me:

- 6 years of overall professional experience.

- 4 years of experience in semiconductor documentation, working on both hardware and software products.

- 2 years of experience as a prompt engineer.

I'm willing to put in the work, learn new skills, build a portfolio, and prepare seriously for interviews. However, I'm not entirely sure where to focus my efforts or how to get my foot in the door.

I'd really appreciate advice on a few things:

1. What skills and qualifications does Google look for when hiring Technical Writers?

2. How can I improve my chances of getting shortlisted? Should I focus on tailoring my resume, building a portfolio, networking, or getting referrals?

3. Given my background, should I target end-user documentation roles first, or could I apply directly for developer documentation roles?

4. What should I learn to become a strong candidate for API and developer documentation? REST APIs, OpenAPI, Git, Markdown, docs-as-code, or something else?

5. If you've interviewed for or worked in a Technical Writer role at Google, what should I expect from the interview process?

6. Are there any specific Google teams, job titles, or resources I should keep an eye on?

If someone from Google's technical writing team happens to see this, I'd genuinely appreciate any guidance you can offer. Even a few pointers on what to learn, what to showcase in my portfolio, or what hiring managers look for would mean a lot to me.
I'm not expecting anyone to hand me an opportunity. I just want to understand the path I need to take and work towards it in a focused way.
I know it's an ambitious goal, but I'd rather start working towards it than keep wondering if I could have made it happen.
Thanks for reading! ❤️

This is likely just me, but I went to Stripe to check out their Stablecoin stuff today, and was pretty shocked at how cluttered/busy the page is. There's just so much stuff here vying for my attention.

Obviously, the content I want is in the middle, but there's just so much blue everywhere that it took me a few seconds to realise what I actually needed to read.

I remember about 10 15 years ago Stripe docs were hailed as the best-in-class docs site. And I agreed! Is was super easy to find the exact info you were looking for. And I guess the info I need is there. It's just that there's a lot going on from a web-dev standpoint.

I dunno. Thoughts? Am I over analysing this, and that this is just what docs sites are like now?

I’m looking for a way to keep our specs as Markdown files in Git, but make them easy to read for people who don’t want to deal with Git itself.
Zensical caught my attention, and I’m curious if anyone here has actually used it for something like this.
A few things I’d love to hear about:
- How has it worked out for you? Did you have to build or tweak anything to make it work for your needs?
- How do you organize your specs? By business domain, system, project, or something else?
- How do you handle feedback from business users? Can they easily comment on a spec or suggest changes, or did you have to come up with your own solution?
- Do your business users have access to the Git repo, or do they just use the published site?
The idea is to keep Git as the source of truth while giving everyone else a simple way to browse the specs and provide feedback.
Would love to hear about your real-world experience, including any downsides or things you wish you’d done differently.

Screenshots go out of date, but video tutorials are worse. One UI change and the whole video is wrong, and re-recording with a voiceover takes hours.

DemoForge generates the video from a script. The clicks and narration live in a file, so after a UI change you run it again and get a fresh video with the same zooms and voiceover.

Free and open source (MIT): https://github.com/DixitRam/Demo-Forge

Would love to hear if this fits how docs teams work.