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Society for Technical Communication to permanently close its doors

stc.org

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Re: Society for Technical Communication to permanently close its doors

#21

Post by starkparker »

mintplant wrote: post #7
ericholscher wrote: post #3

I've been working in this space for a long time, where I'm one of the co-founders of Write the Docs: https://www.writethedocs.org/ -- we focus more on software docs. The view from the industry is basically that STC was a bit behind the times, and was slowly dwindling in terms of reach and value. They still had some active chapters, magazine, and academic journal that provided value for folks, but membership wasn't as…

I don't know if the ACM is comparable. They run so many academic conferences that the list gets its own Wikipedia page [0]. Many are heavy hitters in their respective fields, like SIGGRAPH (graphics), SOSP (systems), and PLDI (programming languages). I think of them more as an academic publisher and organizer than as a professional association. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Association_for_Compu...

I think the point was more to contrast STC as a certifying and publishing body, versus WTD as more of a peer/user group.

Re: Society for Technical Communication to permanently close its doors

#23

Post by wakawaka28 »

nimish wrote: post #22

LLMs basically make this job irrelevant for 99.999% of use cases so this is unsurprising.

LLMs produce a ton of garbage. The job is still relevant if you care about accuracy. Maybe LLMs or some future form of AI can do the job, but using LLMs today is ill-advised.

Re: Society for Technical Communication to permanently close its doors

#24

Post by spondylosaurus »

nimish wrote: post #22

LLMs basically make this job irrelevant for 99.999% of use cases so this is unsurprising.

I think you grossly overestimate the accuracy of LLM-generated docs and underestimate how much time technical writers spend on tasks that aren't strictly "writing." Generating text is the easy part; gathering and verifying information is much more tedious, but arguably way more important.

And I have yet to encounter an LLM that can repeatedly poke an engineer or PM until they cough up the details you're after—let alone one that can do that without making an enemy out of that engineer or PM :P

Re: Society for Technical Communication to permanently close its doors

#25

Post by unforswearing »

billybuckwheat wrote: post #18
unforswearing wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear about your experience. I recently considered joining STC in an attempt to bolster my career a bit (as technical writer without a college degree), but wasn't sure the theoretical benefits were worth the membership cost. Sounds like they might not have been able to help much in that area.

Even before the STC called it a day, you'd probably be better served attending local tech writer meetups (assuming there are any in your area) or joining the Write the Docs community ( https://www.writethedocs.org/ ). When I was toiling in the tech comm world, I found that both helped my in my career more than interacting with the STC.

Thanks for these suggestions. I subscribe to the Write the Docs newsletter, and this is good motivation for me to dig deeper into what they have to offer.

Re: Society for Technical Communication to permanently close its doors

#26

Post by nimish »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #23
nimish wrote: post #22

LLMs basically make this job irrelevant for 99.999% of use cases so this is unsurprising.

LLMs produce a ton of garbage. The job is still relevant if you care about accuracy. Maybe LLMs or some future form of AI can do the job, but using LLMs today is ill-advised.

99.999% of jobs do not care about accuracy at the level of a technical writer. The ones that do will continue to hire them.
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