My memory may be a little hazy, but check out /u/GrinchofSR on Reddit for someone who has spun technical writing into a long term location independent career - and not the 'it costs me $1,000/mth to squat here' Digital Nomad, I recall him sharing average months of around $20,000 income which is 'making a living' by pretty much every standard.
Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
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Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
#12I'm a programmer, but I worked on products that had multiple full-time technical writers. Think of expensive commercial software that people use to make money. Video editing, engineering simulation, etc. Those companies are likely to have technical writers on staff.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
#13My wife writes documentation full time for open source software (Red Hat), she was making enough to live off it.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
#14Finding a tech geek who can put together a coherent sentence is hard, and there are always manuals to write, tutorials to create and deep blog posts to make -- many of which need the kind of in-depth understanding that only a tech geek can bring.
It doesn't always need a technical background -- a friend of mine found a job writing drug trial instructions even though she had no background in medicine or biology. But she was pretty exceptional, and very quick on the up-take so she probably absorbed a couple of years of medtech education in the first few months she was there.
So yes, you can make a career out of that. Apply for jobs and say "I want a role where I can program 50% of the time and write all your public-facing words the other 50% of your time". There are many employers who would pay a premium for that unique combination of skills which you have already demonstrated.
As for freelance authoring... I'm writing book #8 now. The first 6 are all deeply technical books on backup and managing IT (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/ ); the seventh was a collection of mathematics/computing/physics poetry ( http://www.ifost.org.au/books/outlinks/medusa ).
These are rather small niches, but in most of these areas I'm one of the leading experts in the field -- usually because there's no-one else writing anything.
Based on what I'm getting from my work so far, I'd estimate that I would need to get to 50-100 books written before I could stop relying on other sources of income. I live in an expensive city and have a family, so you might be able to do slightly more easily than me. Also, if I wrote something less niche, I might have a bigger market (but probably face more competition).
In other words, I might be able to write full-time in 10-15 years' time if I keep up the current output. That is something I am aiming to do, but it's obviously not a short-term goal.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
#15Friend of mine does technical translations (English > German). That seems sufficiently niche to be financially viable.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
#16On the product/company employment side of things, technical writing is a rich field, with many people who excel and push the boundaries of making the previously inaccessible clear as day. There's a living to be had there as well if you strive for the latter; you can advance and prove your value in any company.
For an anecdote, as a product person, I would kill for a technical writer who works really hard to understand our product, our customers and personas, and keeps up with our roadmap and release process with on-the-ball documentation updates and copywriting. I see tons of opportunity there internally.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
#17I serve on the evangelism team at Twilio. Technical writing is a big part of our job. We also spun up a Developer Education team last year which writes in-depth tutorials and the docs. I think you may have been asking if it's possible to live off of freelance technical writing, in which case, I can't answer that based off of personal experience. But there absolutely are jobs out there that require a competent develop…
Hey I'm curious about how your team evaluates technical writing talent, what does the process for hiring look like?
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
#18We employ a "technical" writer of a different sense. The answer is yes.
To get started, find industry blogs or websites with an aggressive content strategy that are willing to pay. Build up that resume and keep moving up and making contacts within your field.
All the better if you can snazz up the content with good-looking HTML/CSS and images so that the editor has less work to do.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
#19I was a product architect in advertising for a brief period. About half the job involved writing all sorts of technical documentation, including functional specifications for developers, internal and user-facing API docs, and user guides for websites, apps, and installations we built. I loved this part of the work because of how it was a mix of both info design (you're practically a graphic designer in this respect) and rigorous research that usually involved consulting the designers and devs for knowledge, but sometimes external specialists as well.
To be a product architect you need to:
- Express interest/expertise in learning (constantly) about existing and emerging products/systems/technologies
- Be creative (product definition is your job after all)
- Understand all the moving parts of software development (what do the BE developers do, what do the UX designers do and when, etc)
- Be business savvy
IMO the broad skill-set requirement and critical nature of the position makes it a hard job, but if you love technical writing and already know a bit about software/programming then you could easily fall in love with this line of work.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing?
#20I used to be part of a small tech writing firm. The bulk of our work was RFQs, tenders, req specs, user manuals, procedures manuals - all corporate wordsmithing. It paid pretty well, but I found it very tedious. And the politics and the PHB attacks were draining to say the least. Creative and Fun are two words that positively do not come to mind about that phase of my life.
What's a PHB attack?