SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa - Why Work with a Tech Writer?

Betsy Beyer, Google

The sparsely-attended SREcon17 Americas Tech Writing talk focused on HOW to work with Tech Writers. I'm instead focusing on WHY you should work with a TW--because they make your life easier, and can make the work you're already doing have more impact.

Reasons to engage a TW:

If you need to explain your product/service/etc. to users: Chances are, the most satisfying, enjoyable, and rewarding part of your job is engineering work—creating a tool, fixing a problem, redesigning infrastructure, etc. It *isn't* answering the same questions from users over and over. → Get solid documentation in place to free up engineer time.
If your team internal documentation is a mess: It might be hard to find the docs you need when you get paged, hard to identify current content, or some information might just be flat-out missing. → A TW can help you whip a documentation rat's nest into shape, and give you the tools to maintain your docs easily moving forward.
If you want to make your work more visible (so other people can leverage it and learn from it): → A TW can help you get that information out there!