A Career in Technical Writing: Bright Lights, Big City

Bullet Points

• Megacorporation is a term popularized by the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson. It denotes a multi-national corporation that has become so large that in many cases it is its own customer or even its own government. Megacorporations often come complete with their own military. These companies are considered to be fictional, but the company I worked at had a U.S. Army base in its parking lot, so I will let you be the judge.
• Cubicle farm is a term popularized by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. It describes an enormous room partitioned off by low fabric walls that separate workers (but not sound). These cubicles are approximately the same size and dimensions as the stalls that farms use to house large animals. Another farm-related term for a cubicle is veal-fattening pen which was popularized by Douglas Adams in the book Generation X.
• A disaster recovery plan is a plan for resuming key business functions (such as payroll and accounting) after a catastrophic disruption in operations. Such a plan presumes that no specific team member can be reached or contribute to the recovery, so all processes must be independently executable.
• An extended stay hotel caters to business travelers who are in need of short to long-term housing. The rooms tend to come with kitchens, free local phone service, weekly or twice-weekly maid service, and on-site laundry facilities. The better hotels have full cable television, concierge service, a pool and free continental breakfast. I wasn’t at one of the better ones.
• Phoenix, Arizona regularly reaches temperatures above 110 degrees in the summer.

Welcome to the Machine

The branch of the megacorporation that I worked at was housed in a low-slung building that stretched on for at least a quarter-mile. My cubicle was in a warehouse-sized room that seemed to never end. At least 400 of us worked in this vast cubicle farm. My stall was located across the aisle from a flock of customer support personnel who serviced the Asian branches of the company. At any time during the day, I could hear a cacophony of languages that I didn’t understand a word of.

Their customer service work had nothing to do with my job, and not a single person in my row greeted me when I arrived or said anything beyond hello at any point during my stay. The only time I ever heard from any of them was when one of their herd sent an e-mail asking me to stop snapping my gum. I was chewing ginseng gum at the time in an effort to curb hunger pains as part of my most recent ridiculous diet. Apparently none of them were willing to ask me to stop directly. That would have required speaking to me. I was greatly amused to discover that my noise distracted them as much as their noise distracted me. I didn’t stop chewing the gum but I did try to back off on the snapping - a little.

Fly Casual

It turned out that writing service level agreements wasn’t as boring as I thought it was. It was geometrically more boring than I thought it was. I wasn’t even writing the materials. A friendly but bland middle manager wrote them up. All I had to do was read through the documents and fix the grammar, usage and formatting. I then sent the documents back to the friendly but bland middle manager and if he had any questions, he emailed them back to me. We rarely saw each other.

The work itself would have made for a dreadfully dull job, but the real problem was that he only produced something for me to edit about every three weeks. The remaining days were spent trying to look busy without using the Internet. If I didn’t look busy or if people saw me use the Internet, people complained. They didn’t complain to me. They didn’t talk to me at all. They complained to my friendly but bland middle-manager. This would result in an email from him. The friendly but bland middle manager sympathized with my lack of work, and he never seemed angry, but he made it clear that I could only use the Internet “during lunch”. To cope with my boredom, I brought in books on web development and FrameMaker. I also read whatever SAP guides they had lying around. It helped me to look busy, and I did learn a few things, but the days just dragged by.

Summer in the City

In addition to being bored at work, I was also bored when I got off work. I still considered Tucson to be my home, but I needed a place to stay in Phoenix. I rented a room by the week at an extended stay hotel. The room was decent, if ugly. It had a framed picture on the wall that I was sure contained a carpet remnant. It had a kitchen, but I never bothered to cook. I mainly lived off of Subway sandwiches (it worked for Jared) and Gatorade along with a refrigerator shelf full of the Kirkland brand diet drink. I had begun the job in the middle of July and the temperature rarely dipped under 100 degrees even in the middle of the night, so I never felt like going anywhere. For the most part I came home and watched baseball on the television or went for a swim. I scribbled some poetry in my journal then went to bed.

By late September I gave up on living in Phoenix and started driving up from Tucson every day. I did this mainly because it killed time and I could at least see my friends and family for an hour or two. I began listening to books on tape as I drove: A Brief History of Time, The Razor’s Edge, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (plus The Hobbit), the Interview with a Vampire series. Books on tape kept me going. All the driving was exhausting though. By late October the temperature had cooled somewhat, and I spent many of my lunch hours over the fall and winter months sleeping in my car. The office building was under the approach to Sky Harbor Airport. I watched the planes cruise in above me, one every thirty seconds, until I fell asleep. It was just like counting sheep.

Flirtin’ With Disaster

Because I had nothing to do, and therefore no good reason to say no, the bland but friendly middle manager started sending me to meetings to take notes for him. I considered this to be secretarial work, and told him so, but it was still more pleasant than sitting in my cubicle trying to look busy. Most of these meetings were the standard megacorporation time-wasters. A roomful of people would gather to argue over timelines, statuses and budgets.

One group managed to capture my interest — the Disaster Recovery Team (DRT). The DRT (pronounced dirt) met every week to work on a plan for what to do if the central SAP site was destroyed and everyone was either dead or missing. This was a megacorporation, and it had a worldwide organization to run whether we were at the bottom of a smoking crater or not. I volunteered to write the disaster recovery plan. They had set up collocations for the servers in Illinois and an archive storage facility in upstate New York. We put together a plan to reassemble this information if a disaster struck. We all agreed, quite rightly, that the priority would be the payroll department. The processes I documented were dry, but the meetings were fun because we got to spend a lot of time thinking of ways in which the site could be destroyed: earthquakes, fires, riots, chemical attacks, nuclear attacks, even disgruntled workers. We decided that a gun-toting employee did not rise to the level of disaster and was therefore outside of our scope. All of this speculation helped me to pass the days.

Goodbye Stranger

Beyond those moments, the job never did get interesting. After about eight months the friendly but bland middle manager called me in to let me know they were terminating my contract early. They didn’t have anything for me to do. He was nice enough to give me a month’s notice so I didn’t make waves about the “year contract” I had agreed to. Arizona is a right-to-work state, so I really didn’t have any recourse anyway. They could have let me go at any time.

I sent my resume out to the usual suspects, but the month passed without a nibble. To tell the truth, I wasn’t that disappointed. The daily drive and the boredom had left me exhausted and burnt out. I needed a break. The week after the job ended, my health caught up to me. I came down with a severe case of the flu and I barely got out of bed for almost a month. I laid in bed and read, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, about a dozen times. Getting lost in the woods of northern Maine seemed oddly similar to having a never-ending bout with the flu. It was quite a while before I felt like myself again, and by then I was in desperate need of another job. It was right about then that Silicon Valley called and asked me out on a date. Would it be a Love Connection?

Further Reading

• Douglas Coupland’s Generation X Neo-logisms: Coupland provided many terms for corporate culture and job dissatisfaction including Anti-Sabbatical, Consensus Terrorism, McJob, Mid-Twenties Breakdown, Rebellion Postponement, and Sick Building Migration.
• Step by Step Guide for Disaster Recovery Planning: A good introduction to planning and writing a disaster recovery plan.
• Service Level Agreements: An overview of Service Level Agreements from the folks at ZDnet.

Questions

• What experiences have you had with large corporations?
• Have you ever been housed in a cubicle farm?
• What is your ideal (realistic) corporate environment? Do you consider one to be possible?
• Would it be a good idea to create a personal disaster recovery plan?

A Career in Technical Writing: By the time I get to Phoenix

Bullet Points

• The more relaxed you are, the better a job interview tends to go
• Subject knowledge is great, but tools skills help you land jobs
• A service level agreement (SLA) is a document that describes the performance criteria a provider promises to meet while delivering a service.

The Next Interview

I drove to Phoenix to interview for a contract at a company that specialized in providing computer services and training. This company was a major player in the services field, but the place was decidedly less fancy than the one that had flown me into Dallas. The corporate location doubled as a call center. Like most call centers, the walls were covered with motivational sayings and banners pushing sales level contests and company pride. I couldn’t help but think of my experiences with the Help Desk manager at PHPS who wanted me to be a high-energy technical writer with a big smile on my face. The manager at this company, however, was decidedly low-energy. He was overweight and unkempt — exactly the sort of geek I was comfortable working with.

We went over my experience and I showed him my newly improved portfolio. He seemed happy with it. He asked me the standard questions about past experience and work styles. He seemed to like my answers and I felt as if I was a good fit for what they were looking for. At the end of the interview he asked how soon I could be available if they decided they needed me. “Next week,” I told him. He nodded and shook my hand. I wasn’t sure if I had the job, but I felt better about this interview than I did about the interview in Dallas. When I got home, there was a message on my voice mail from the recruiter. She said that the manager had been very impressed. He had one more interview left to do, but I was the front-runner.

A few minutes later, I received a phone call from another Phoenix recruiter. This recruiter wanted to know if I was available for an interview today. I told her that I had just gotten back from Phoenix. I couldn’t handle driving back up there again that day, but I would be happy to come in the next day. She set up a meeting for eight the next morning.

Mega-Corporation

It was another contract position. This interview was with a mega-corporation that had more fingers in more pies than you can imagine. The first two companies I had interviewed with were in the Fortune 500, but this one was in the top ten. It not only had a substantial retail and manufacturing presence, it was also a major military contractor. The location I interviewed at came complete with its own little U.S. Army base.

I interviewed with two people, a manager and a writer. The writer had accepted another position, and they were looking for someone to replace her. Of my three interviews, this was the most relaxed. I was fairly sure that I had the other job and it showed. I sat back in my chair and listened to the two of them pitch the position. They told me that I would be writing supporting documentation for a major SAP (a finance and administration package for large companies) conversion project. Much of my work would be service level agreements and planning documents. It sounded like a dull job to me, but I didn’t say that in the interview. I stayed positive. My interviewers were mainly concerned with my Microsoft Word and FrameMaker skills. I told them I had once been a Microsoft Word trainer, and that everything in my portfolio was created in FrameMaker. That was what they wanted to hear. I walked out of the meeting feeling good.

An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse

That afternoon I got feedback on all three of my interviews. The interview in Dallas had been a bust, just as I suspected. They didn’t like my sample and they didn’t think I was a good fit for the company. The recruiter seemed slightly annoyed with me, and reminded me that my beach time would end with the next check. I was no longer their employee. Both Phoenix interviews, however, resulted in job offers. The computer services company offered me $25 per hour for a six-month contract that could extend “indefinitely”. The megacorporation offered me the same amount, but for a year contract. I told the recruiter and account manager for the megacorporation that I preferred the other contract. The duration was shorter, but the work sounded more interesting to me. I told them I didn’t want to spend the next year of life writing service level agreements and such.

The account manager asked if a higher offer might persuade me. I told her it might, but that I planned to accept the other offer as soon as I got off the phone. She asked me to wait a half hour. Forty-five minutes later, she called back. She upped the offer to $30 an hour plus a $240 a week tax-free mileage allowance for my travel expenses. I still wasn’t too thrilled with the work, but I needed the money (my debts were far from paid off) so I took the offer. Little did I know that I would soon be flirting with disaster…

Further Reading

Technical Writing – Finding Jobs Through Agencies by Ugur Akinci, Ph.D.: Additional information on what to consider when using a consulting agency in your technical writing job search.

Questions

• If you had to choose between a moderate paying job that sounded interesting or a much higher paying job that sounded dull, which would you choose?
• Would your answer change if you were deep in debt or completely out of debt?

Note: This post was originally a part of the last post in the series, Planes, Trainers and Automobiles but was separated because it ran too long. The two posts are really companion pieces.

08/18/2008 Writing Jobs and Links

Today’s Writing Job Roll

Political Blogger — Tucson, AZ

Copywriter — Greenville, Wi

Copywriter — Mobile, AL

Editor — Modesto, CA

Editor — New York, NY

Editor — Washington, DC

Technical Writer/Editor — Virginia

Junior Writer/Editor — Silver Springs, MD

Proofreader — Parsippany, NJ

Proofreader — Washington, DC

Technical Writer — Tucson, AZ

Technical Writer — San Jose, CA

Technical Writer — Beverly Hills, CA

Technical Writer — Ithaca, NY

Today’s Job and Writing Links

Forget the Details and Work On the Big Picture: Harry realized something about web design today. Work on the whole darn thing. I’m proud of him.

Does Your Website Smell? I was hoping this article was about Chronic CSS Halitosis, something I have been fighting for years, but it is about adding emotion to your copywriting.

25 Painless Ways to Free Up an Hour a Day for Your Goals: To which I will add, “screw it, just do it”.

Goodbye, Cubicle. I Quit My Job Today: I’ve modded my cubicle so much it would take two weeks notice to set the thing right again.

Tips for Staying Ahead of Your Freelance Writing Work: Can you mind map your way into more freelance work?