I See Dead Projects

One of the great things about blogging is that, for the most part, there is little lead time. You write something and then you publish it. If you’re lucky, you get feedback and if it is particularly good you get repeat visitors. You might write ahead, gathering several days or even weeks worth of posts in advance, but for the most part you are writing as you go.

In the world of technical writing, you are often assigned to projects that last for months or even years, and in many cases the material you write today may not be read for a long time. Occasionally, it won’t get read at all, at least not by the people you intended it for. This has been a fairly regular occurrence in my career. My first major project lasted a year. At the end of that year, the company was part of a merger and moved to the other company’s software platform, negating all of my work.

Later on in my career, I documented what was expected to be a major product for a very large hardware/software company.  Because of the lead time for localization, I had to complete the documentation two months before the product was to be released. I had just finished up and sent off my work to the translators when word came down that the project was being scrapped due to a poor business case. Poor business case was code for, “our competitors decided to include this tool for free in their new operating system”.

My most recent bout of deadprojectitis hasn’t been quite as severe. The product I have been working on for the past two years was released and most of my documentation is at least available to customers. Nonetheless, the product is on its way out. It won’t be gone today or tomorrow, but it is being replaced by something newer and shinier and almost certainly better. The change came suddenly. Just a month ago, it looked like the product would be getting a major overhaul that would have me up to my armpits in documentation for the next six months, but things change.

In all of these cases, far more than my own efforts were negated. There were programmers, engineers, project managers, product managers, business analysts and a host of other people who had their efforts negated. These things happen. Companies change direction, market forces change people’s needs, competitors beat you. This is the world of business and it is frustrating. In some cases people don’t just see their hard work pushed aside, they actually lose their jobs. There isn’t always another project waiting around the corner. These are the realities of the business world. In the current economy, it is something you’ll see more and more of. Companies will be cutting expenses, and often that comes in the area of new development, or the elimination of existing products.

There is no magic solution to this problem. It helps if you can be assigned to more than one project, so that you aren’t defined by a single product, but those choices aren’t always your to make. This is the business world. When things do wrong you pick yourself back up, dust yourself off and get back in the game.

A Career in Technical Writing: The fax about outsourcing

The Bullet Points

• Outsourcing means contracting with another company to provide a service that would otherwise be performed by an employee. This is often done for projects because they require a temporary increase in resources.
• Offshoring means relocating a job (either by outsourcing or through your own company) to a foreign country because of costs of other considerations.
• When you get a new job, there is always paperwork involved whether you are a regular employee or a contractor.
• The fax machine remains the dominant source of communication for signed forms.
• Typical paperwork includes contracts, confidentiality/non-disclosure agreements, direct deposit forms, right-to-work and tax information.

Outsourced, not Offshored

The term outsourcing gets misinterpreted pretty often these days. Most people, when they think about outsourcing, think of some guy in a foreign country who answers the phone when you call customer support. While that person may or may not be outsourced labor, the better term for sending a job to another country is offshoring. Outsourcing simply means that a company contracts with another company to provide a service that would otherwise be performed by an employee.

Outsourcing is a very common practice that often takes place locally. Companies outsource using temporary employment agencies, consulting agencies or simply companies that specialize in a service. They might outsource such things as their advertising and marketing, public relations, custodial services or their technical support. Individuals also outsource. They outsource when they hire people to do such things as their taxes, their laundry, their housekeeping or their landscaping.

In my case, when I first went to work as a contract technical writer, I was providing an outsourced service. I was working for a company in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina. That was the company that signed my checks and provided my benefits. They were also the company I would go to if I had an employment related problem or grievance.

I was working at a company in Tucson, Arizona. That was the company that required my services and the company that gave me most of my marching orders. They told me what they needed and they had the right to review my job performance and even end my contract if they were dissatisfied. I was essentially working for two companies. This created a lot of paperwork and resulted in a lot of faxing.

A Flood of Faxes

It started before I even showed up for my first day of work. The first thing that WTW, the company that paid me, faxed me was my contract. I was a contractor after all. The contract gave the details of my pay (both the amount and frequency), my rights (a short list), and their rights (a long list). I think they also slipped in a couple of chapters from On the Road translated into pig-Latin. With the low readability of a fax it is hard to tell sometimes.

The paperwork amounted to over twenty pages of small type and they had to fax every one of those pages to me. I then had to sign on the long blank lines, initial the short blank lines and fax it back to them. Pages got lost in the transition so they would then fax the paperwork back to me again. I objected to the wording of one portion, so they had to rewrite it and refax it again. In addition to the contract, I had to sign and fax non-disclosure / confidentiality agreements, tax forms, right-to-work forms, direct deposit forms and copies of my identification. All of this took the better part of a day.

Fax machines are pretty ancient technology at this point. These days, email and PDF forms have made the paperwork process a bit easier. In the end though, signed forms still have to be faxed or at least scanned into a computer and emailed. It is a tedious but necessary process.

The Weekly Fax Regimen

I wish I could say that that was the end of my faxing, but it was just the beginning. The process continued once I got to work. As a contract employee I had to have my hours reviewed and signed by a manager (or at least a real employee) and then I had to fax that form to WTW every week. If I didn’t fax in the form, I didn’t get paid.

All of that paperwork and faxing delayed the start of my contract for three days. This distressed the company that requested me because they were in an incredible hurry to get me working. There was a lot of documentation to be done and they were way behind. It was vital that I get started right away. I needed to hit the ground running. At least, that’s what they said…

Further Reading

• Outsourcing vs. Offshoring: What’s the difference? by EC EDI: The terms are not identical.
• Document Hack (A Technical Writer’s Journal): Interview & Negotiation by John Hewitt: A discussion of another interview and hiring session.
• Internet Fax Service List by Kevin Savetz: If you don’t want to use a clunky fax machine, these online services will also send and receive faxes for you.

Discussion Questions

• Do you trust yourself to review a twenty page employment contract on your own?
• Can you think of any services that your have outsourced?
• Have you ever lost a job to outsourcing or offshoring?
• When is the last time you had to fax a document?

Next Time

I begin my life as a newbie technical writer and find that the world isn’t quite what I expected.

A Career in Technical Writing: Two dates to the prom

The Bullet Points

• In the world of contracting, the entire hiring process can take place over the phone
• Knowing the right tool (even a little) can get you the job
• Per diem is a fixed daily allowance for meals and/or lodging
• Beach time is payment for staying with a company but not actually going to work until they find more work for you
• Benefits such as health insurance and paid time off (PTO) come at a cost, and sometimes they are negotiable
• Recruiters always make the job sound great

The Road Not Taken

The first phone call I received that week wasn’t for a technical writing job. It was for a web development job at the local newspaper. The job made sense. I had some newspaper experience and I knew HTML. They wanted somebody who could convert their articles into HTML using a conversion program that would probably require a few on-the-fly tweaks. They brought me in for a job interview and it went well. I met the editor in charge of the online edition and we liked each other instantly. He was a nerd, just like me. We prattled on about HTML for far longer than anyone should.

The downside was the pay. The job would be part-time (25 hours a week) and pay about twelve dollars an hour. That would be barely enough money to skirt bankruptcy, much less get ahead. Still, the job seemed well-suited to my skills and the journalist in me liked the idea of working for the largest daily newspaper in town. The editor promised to call me the next day and let me know whether or not I got the job.

A Bunch of Calls in a Row

I was still dressed in my suit when I got home and the phone rang. I was hoping it was the editor, calling me early, but it was another gig entirely. The company calling was Wesson, Taylor, Wells & Associates. They were a contracting agency out of North Carolina that specialized in placing programmers in the health care industry. They wanted to know if I could interview for a technical writing job that day. I still had my suit on, so I said sure, just tell me where to go. You don’t have to go anywhere, the man said, I’m going to have the head programmer call you in about ten minutes. Eight minutes later, I was talking to the head programmer.

Once again, the interview went well. The programmer wanted to know if I knew anything about Speedware. I answered honestly that I had never heard of it. How about Cobol? Sure, I told him. I knew a little about Cobol. It was a structured language used for building reports and such. Well, it turned out that Speedware was a lot like Cobol, a programming language I knew “a little” about. He asked if I could read Cobol. I told him I had programmed in Basic, Fortran and Assembly language. Reading code didn’t frighten me. Either my answers were good or they were desperate, because the next thing I knew I had an offer.

All the Work I Could Handle

Actually, I had two offers. While I was on the phone with the head programmer, the newspaper editor called (a day early) to offer me the web job. The recruiter for WTW simply had more to offer though. He could either pay me $20 an hour without benefits or $29,000 a year salary with benefits (paid medical, holidays, paid time off). If I took the $29,000 I would be considered a regular employee of WTW with a permanent job, even though I would be contracting for a local health insurance company. When this gig ended, he explained, they would find me another. It might not be in the same city, but if I moved I would get per diem, which is a daily (tax free) allowance to cover living expenses. In the meantime, if they hadn’t landed me a gig, I would be paid beach time. Beach time means that you keep getting paid even though you aren’t currently working on a contract. You could go to the beach if you wanted. He told me WTW had plenty of work to offer, and that I would probably be working steadily for years.

I took the full-time gig, and using the power of the other offer (without revealing the pay) I eventually negotiated the salary up to $35,000 with benefits. In addition, because I told him I might take the newspaper job as well (it would be nights) he offered to pay me to redesign the WTW web site, writing new web copy and creating a new visual look. Suddenly, I had all the work I could handle. I also had to fire up the fax machine…

Further Reading

• Evaluating a Job Offer by the US Department of Labor: Advice on researching a job or a company.
• Employee benefits by Wikipedia: A rundown of the general benefits that might be available for a job.
• How to Find Technical Writing Jobs by John Hewitt: My step-by-step guide to the process.

Questions

• Is money the primary consideration in a job search?
• If one job paid significantly less than another, what other factors might lead you to take the lower-paying job?
• What experiences have you had with job recruiters?

Next Time

I’ll discuss some of the things that happen after you take the job but before you actually start the job.

Adobe FrameMaker for Technical Writers

Adobe FrameMaker is the Documentation Standard

Adobe FrameMaker is the industry standard for writing book-length technical documentation. It is a powerful program capable of creating books of well over a thousand pages. The learning curve for the program is significant. Adobe FrameMaker is a much different animal than Microsoft Word and other word processors.

It uses, not surprisingly, a frame system (pre-designed pages that text flows into) for creating pages. The user designs frames to apply to pages. Each frame can contain a combination of text and graphics. Those frames either operate as separate and distinct units or flow from page to page. Using these frames, the user sets up master pages and reference pages. These pages allow the user to create a standardized, but still very malleable, series of pages. The user can design a page to implement at the beginning of a chapter, for example, or design a page specifically for tables, graphs, or other graphics. Creating templates can be tedious, but once they are operational and you know the shortcuts, you can develop documents quickly.

Adobe FrameMaker versus Microsoft Word

In addition to the frames, another feature that separates Adobe FrameMaker from Word is its ability to create character formats, paragraph formats and implement variables. Microsoft Word has these capabilities, but they are much more limited than Adobe FrameMaker’s. More importantly, few Microsoft users have ever bothered to explore these higher functions and they remain quite buggy.

Adobe FrameMaker’s greatest feature is its bookmaker. The bookmaker allows you to develop different files around different functions. For example, you can have a file for the cover, for the front matter, for the table of contents, for each chapter, for the appendices, for the glossary and for the index. The bookmaker then keeps track of all these documents and makes sure they cooperate for such tasks as updating the table of contents and the index.

In my situation, the form of the pages was long ago set. I do not have to develop pages or frames from scratch. Unfortunately, many of the documents I will work with were written in the 1990s using Adobe FrameMaker 4. The current version of Adobe FrameMaker is 9, and many changes have occurred in the interface and the document handling. Because of that, I must subtly massage the documents to bring them into line with current standards. For example, there are some invalid fonts and minor formatting flaws that I have to look out for.

Additional Resources

• Adobe FrameMaker 9 Classroom in a Book
• Adventures with the New Technical Communication Suite from Adobe
• What’s new in FrameMaker 9

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