My transition as a Technical Writer from Software Development

I was a software engineer for about 10years before transferring to the technical writer’s role. As a software engineer, I always placed a strong emphasis on the quality of documentation. I ended up volunteering to write documentation frequently. Over time, I noticed that I actually like writing better than software development. As an engineer, I spent a significant amount of time on tasks unrelated to my goals (integrating with other systems, debugging issues that had nothing to do with my software, digging through ugly legacy code, compliance, conformance, meetings, etc.). As a writer, I spend the majority of my time working towards my goals and finding creative solutions to complex problems. This makes me happy.

I started my journey as a software developer, where I routinely ended up editing my team’s design docs and writing the end-user docs for the products I’d designed and coded. I found that collaborating with my team — engineers, UX designers, business analysts, product managers, and marketing — and working with the system’s users greatly improved the docs and the software itself!

As I became more and more a user advocate, I found that I enjoy documenting the software more than writing it — especially “documenting”​ in the broadest sense of the word: presentations, white papers, reports, ghostwriting blog posts, data-sheets, user’s guides, developer references and so on.

Finding experienced technical writers with the right tech skills, together with good English writing skills, and a good ability to explain hard things in a simple way is quite a challenge.

If you’re interested in making the transition from Developer to Technical Writer, make sure you do it for the right reasons, because you enjoy writing technical documentation, and not because you feel you’ll never become a rockstar developer. It’s a challenging area on its own, but it is a rewarding career for a software engineer that has a knack for explaining things to people.