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Back in the olden days (OK, 5 years ago), vetting a potential employee meant making a phone call or two to references carefully screened and prepped by the job candidate himself. Unless you hired a private detective, secrets remained secrets and private lives remained private. Not so in this day and age. A simple search on any number of social media sites can tell you who your candidate associates with and what causes or groups he’s aligned with. You may even find you have mutual friends you didn’t know about.

...sitting down to his first job as a technical writer back in 1992. His tools were a pad of paper and the most basic version of word processing that we can imagine today. Indexing was still done first on actual index cards and large files were saved on multiple floppy disks. Layout was a slow and meticulous process, and closing a file was a long, drawn out affair. PDFs were still light years away in the future.

Why don’t technical writers (or customers) read?

Come on, you’ve seen it yourself. Give a technical writer a new product or a gadget, they open the box, toss the manual and then try on their own to figure out how it works. So why spend money to write the manual in the first place? And how can it be that technical writers have so little respect for their own line of work?

In the past few weeks, many claims have been made about our new world economy. Perhaps the most thought provoking is an article I just read about how many of us are about to become useless in the next few years. Simply put, “the economy no longer needs us”. Is this the future of technical writing? Are we and our “product” obsolete and no longer needed?