I am the last remaining tech writer at my company.
It's an interesting position to be in, a dubious honor.
The last person standing…
Many years and many business models ago, I joined a team that was growing. A year before I was hired, the Technical Documentation Department consisted of a sole writer, an amazing woman with a doctorate in Scandinavian studies with a particular focus in Old Norse and Iceland. Tech writers tend to be a motley lot. Two writers had been hired a few months before me. Another writer, a "senior" writer joined the team at the same time I did. He didn't last long... something about tagging "Arbeit Macht Frei" to the end of an email when our biggest customer was Bayerische Vereinsbank. He tried to explain it as black Irish humor. It felt more like neutron-star-dense stupidity even to me, a lowly larval tech writer.
I was hired in late 1997, before the explosive inflation of the Dot Com Bubble. I remember the recruiter almost apologizing for the interview he arranged. Yes, it was a software company, but they were a little staid because they built software for banks. I didn't much care. I had recently quit a stultifying position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a contract position with KLA-Tencor, and a sub-contracting position with KLA-Tencor. (There's a story in itself.) With three jobs and going to school to get my certificate in technical writing, I felt rather thinly stretched. I needed to make a change so I did. I quit all three positions and went looking for a job. Some folks told me later that the smart thing to do is get the job and then quit.
Luckily my jump into the void didn't last too long. My first interview was in a beautiful building on the corner of University and High, right in downtown Palo Alto.
Those were heady days. My wife and I found a mobile home in Sunnyvale that we could afford: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and 800 square feet all for the bargain price of $860 a month, which was easily 50% less than friends were paying for puny apartments with neighbors on five sides and no parking. I rode my bike to work 13 miles every morning, arriving around 7 a.m. It gave me enough time to shower and clean up and be ready for the morning. In the evening, I'd carpool with my wife who worked at Stanford.
Our doc team grew as the bubble expanded. We moved to new, custom digs in Mountain View. My wife and I got a couple of cats and bought a house.
The high water mark of the team was six folks, including the manager, who was promoted out and who offered me her job.
I'd have to say that that has been the apex of my career so far. I managed a team of three writers (one transferred to Product Management, one moved on to greener pastures at BEA, and one senior writer was hired). Our product was going to change the world.
Then, as many suspected it would, the bubble deflated. After four rounds of layoffs, there were two writers left.
We had both been hired in '97 as junior writers. We both had grown in skill and ability under the skillful tutelage of our manager. More importantly, we had worked side by side with a common purpose for five long years.
Now I feel like Mac in Predator. He and the governor of Minnesota walked into a firefight. Out of an entire platoon, only two survived. They walked out without a scratch. Bullets might not have wounded them, but the trauma they shared left scars unseen. Now I'm the one sitting in the moonlight, contemplating the smoking corpse of the only remaining tech writer and carrying on a pseudo-psychotic dialog. I wonder when I'm going to be targeted for elimination, those three little laser dots glowing on my forehead.
In the meantime, I continue to hump and sweat and feel a little rush of relief with every paycheck that clears.
Pakeha