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To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

passo.uno

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Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#171

Post by nicbou »

esafak wrote: post #152
nicbou wrote: post #26

I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers' problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being. I revise my local public transit guide every time I expe…

Are you working in the legal field or is that separate? How big is your company?

I work alone. My website is https://allaboutberlin.com

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#172

Post by DangitBobby »

9rx wrote: post #164
oldjim798 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this is what capital has told us. Capital always wants to reduce the labour cost to $0.

Zero labor cost should see the number of engineers trend towards infinity. The earlier comment suggested the opposite — that it would fall to just 1000 engineers. That would indicate that the cost of labor has skyrocketed.

That doesn't make sense. Demand isn't entirely dictated by cost. There is only so much productivity the world is equipped to consume.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#173

Post by 9rx »

DangitBobby wrote: post #172
9rx wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero labor cost should see the number of engineers trend towards infinity. The earlier comment suggested the opposite — that it would fall to just 1000 engineers. That would indicate that the cost of labor has skyrocketed.

That doesn't make sense. Demand isn't entirely dictated by cost. There is only so much productivity the world is equipped to consume.

What difference does that make? If the cost of an engineer is zero, they can work on all kinds of nonsensical things that will never be used/consumed. It doesn't really matter as it doesn't cost anything.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#174

Post by jraph »

ainiriand wrote: post #86
jraph wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if you acquire those skills yourself you shape your brain in a way that is definitely useful to you in many other aspects of life. Yep, and reading you will feel less boring. The uniform style of LLMs gets old fast and I wouldn't be surprised if it were a fundamental flaw due to how they work. And it's not even sure speed gains from using LLMs make up for the skill loss in the long term.

It is such a challenge! As English is not my first language I have to do some mind gimnastics to really convey my thoughts. 'On writing well' is on my list to read, it is supposed to help.

It is a challenge!

I'll take imperfect ESL writing or imperfect writing in my native language over LLM soup any day.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#175

Post by helloaltalt »

samiv wrote: post #156
fainpul wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When it became cheaper to … did the quality go up? No, but the availability (more people can afford it) and diversity (different needs are met) increased. I would say that's a positive. Some of the expensive "legacy" things still exist and people pay for it (e.g. newspapers / professional journalism). Of course low quality stuff increased by a lot and you're right, that leads to problems.

Well yeah more people can afford shitty things that end up in the landfill two weeks later. To me this is the essence of "consumerism". Rather than think in terms of making things cheaper for people to afford we should think how to produce wealthier people who could afford better than the cheapest of cheapest crap.

But in the context of softwares, the landfill argument doesn't fit exactly well (well, sure someone can argue that storage on say, github might take more drives but the scale would be very cheaper than say landfill filled with physical things as well

> Rather than think in terms of making things cheaper for people to afford we should think how to produce wealthier people who could afford better than the cheapest of cheapest crap.

This problem actually runs deep and is systemic. I am genuinely not sure how one can do it when the basis of wealth derives from what exactly? The growth of stock markets which people call bubbles or the US debt crisis which is fueling up in recent years to basically fuel the consumerism spree itself. I am not sure.

If you were to make people wealthy, they might still buy cheapest of cheapest crap just at a 10x more magnitude in many cases (or atleast that's what I observed US to do with how many people buy and sell usually very simple saas tools at times)

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#176

Post by agentultra »

A lot of this applies to programming as well. And pretty much everything people are using GenAI for.

If you want to see how well you understand your program or system, try to write about it and teach someone how it works. Nature will show you how sloppy your thinking is.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#177

Post by nicbou »

DeepSeaTortoise wrote: post #88
nicbou wrote: post #26

I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers' problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being. I revise my local public transit guide every time I expe…

Why shouldn't AI be able to sufficiently model all of this in the not far future? Why shouldn't have it have sufficient access to new data and sensors to be able to collect information on its own, or at least the system that feeds it? Not from a moral perspective of course, but the technical possibility. And the overton window has shifted already so far, the moral aspect might align soon, too. IMO there is an entirel…

> Why shouldn't AI be able to sufficiently model all of this

I call it the banana bread problem.

To curate a list of the best cafés in your city, someone must eventually go out and try a few of them. A human being with taste honed by years of sensory experiences will have to order a coffee, sit down, appreciate the vibe, and taste the banana bread.

At some point, you need someone to go out in the world and feel things. A machine that cannot feel will never be a good curator of human experiences.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#179

Post by nicbou »

Stratoscope wrote: post #140
nicbou wrote: post #26

I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers' problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being. I revise my local public transit guide every time I expe…

Your philosophy reminds me of my friend Caroline Rose. One of Caroline's claims to fame was writing the original Inside Macintosh . You may enjoy this story about her work: https://www.folklore.org/Inside_Macintosh.html As a counterpoint, the very worst "documentation" (scare quotes intended) I've ever seen was when I worked at IBM. We were all required to participate in a corporate training about IBM's Watson coding…

The map is not the territory! Documentation is a helpful, curated simplification of the real thing. What to include and what to leave out depends on the audience.

But if you treat "write documentation" as a box-ticking exercise, a line that needs to turn green on your compliance report, then it can just be whatever.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#180

Post by jr-throw »

None of the ten or so staff tech writers I have worked closely with over the years have honestly been great. This has been disappointing.

Always had to contract external people to get stuff done really well. One was a bored CS university professor, another was a CTO in a struggling tiny startup who needed cash.

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