51–60 of 62 posts
Yes. You have to learn a skill with demand that cannot be met. That is the easiest way to get side work. Learn Salesforce development. I've accepted a new contract role that is full time hours and my older employer straight up told me, "We cannot match your new hourly rate, but here is still a raise. Feel free to work on things for us whenever you want, whenever you have time, remotely." I'm nothing special, an avera…
I actually did some paid technical writing on the side in 2019 on top of my full time job as a developer. It helped a lot that the company I work for started a technical content agency as a new division of the company and was okay with me doing extra paid work for them outside of normal work hours. If you're a developer who is also a decent writer, maybe something like this would work for you? I actually found techni…
I actually did some paid technical writing on the side in 2019 on top of my full time job as a developer. It helped a lot that the company I work for started a technical content agency as a new division of the company and was okay with me doing extra paid work for them outside of normal work hours. If you're a developer who is also a decent writer, maybe something like this would work for you? I actually found techni…
I am also curious as to what exactly do you mean by "technical writing"?
* Write external API documentation/guides.
* Clean up internal API docs written by devs to make them actually readable (without messing up the logic/examples/etc).
* Help with whitepapers (usually with the dev/ops/etc teams).
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I am also curious as to what exactly do you mean by "technical writing"?
Not OP but where I work we hire technical writers to: * Write external API documentation/guides. * Clean up internal API docs written by devs to make them actually readable (without messing up the logic/examples/etc). * Help with whitepapers (usually with the dev/ops/etc teams).
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Exactly. That's the reason why I don't understand that reasonably senior people ever have to go through that whiteboarding crap (or actually through anything more than a friendly chat).
Not everybody has done as good a job maintaining their network. I'm really bad at that sort of thing.
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Not everybody has done as good a job maintaining their network. I'm really bad at that sort of thing.
And for regular jobs (permanent or a long 6-12m contract), you might get referred by your network, but the company needs to whiteboard you all the same (it's policy!). The referral probably prevents your CV getting binned at least.
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And for regular jobs (permanent or a long 6-12m contract), you might get referred by your network, but the company needs to whiteboard you all the same (it's policy!). The referral probably prevents your CV getting binned at least.
If you apply where you have no clout; if I get an invite from my network I assume no hurdles aka based on that they know what I can do for them and that the CTO (in my case) simply removes this requirement.
To counter this, my experiment at the moment is in freelancing at moonlight, but where the client is non-technical and so getting a non-tech to non-tech referral means the client couldn't whiteboard me* if they wanted to, no more than I can white board my dentist. They will base their decision on the trust of the referral, and the fact they can try me out first / easily fire me anyway.
My question to you, is what sort of companies let you skip the hoop jumps? Would Google / Netflix etc allow this, or are they too standardized? I can see a startup allowing this or even needing it as an early employee is much more than just an algo remembering machine. What about a medium size co?
* I just noticed how similar "whiteboarding" and "waterboarding" sound. :-/
I actually did some paid technical writing on the side in 2019 on top of my full time job as a developer. It helped a lot that the company I work for started a technical content agency as a new division of the company and was okay with me doing extra paid work for them outside of normal work hours. If you're a developer who is also a decent writer, maybe something like this would work for you? I actually found techni…
Could you please define what you mean by technical writing? I’m curious since it is such a broad topic.
Most of what I've done has been for clients that want to document how to accomplish something specific with a company's library or API. Usually this ends up being 1200-1500 words including detailed instructions and code samples.
A few weren't product specific, but instead about how to accomplish a specific task with React or Angular. Companies pay for articles like these because they hope to attract customers by providing useful information to developers. I think that's a fair trade, as long as the article is actually good and teaches something new to the people who read it. Personally, if I've read a good article or blog post I don't mind if the company mentions their own products at the end. It's not like they're forcing me to but anything. :)
I've done one whitepaper as well, though I'm not sure that qualifies as 'technical writing'. More like writing a high level topic that is about a technical subject, but aimed at managers and executives who are thinking of adopting that product or technology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you please define what you mean by technical writing? I’m curious since it is such a broad topic.
Sorry for the slow reply. Most of what I've done has been for clients that want to document how to accomplish something specific with a company's library or API. Usually this ends up being 1200-1500 words including detailed instructions and code samples. A few weren't product specific, but instead about how to accomplish a specific task with React or Angular. Companies pay for articles like these because they hope to…
That’s interesting. I had always thought of TW as manuals and documentation. It never occurred to me that it could be “marketing”. At my job we’ve payed people to write articles for Trade journals That relate to our products. But I never thought of it as TW. Now that you mention it, it think it obviously does.
How do you find these gigs? What’s the going rate for 1200 words?