Six years ago, during my last faculty year, a lab teacher asked me a a colleague of mine if we were interested in a Technical Writing job for a company that creates software and hardware in the networking domain. I remember asking myself what’s a technical writer? For curiosity I went to the interview and a day later I was fired.

At the beginning I found the job very complex and very fast I found out that I like the job.

Two years later I combined testing with technical writing and testing was also interesting. With time I accepted new challenges, such as coaching and reviewing Professional Profile for a telecom company (200 people, supporting marketing department and QA engineers.

I never thought to the weaknesses of being a technical writer.
Vishnu, I think it depends on the personal skills of a technical writer. Why?
In IT projects there are idle periods, when one should train himself if the employer does not have other tasks. For me it was easy because I can easily switch between tasks (not necesarily related to writing). You can always come with improvements within the company organization: internal procedure improvement, helping other departments, improve some templates and so on.

You could say that a technical writer just writes documentation, but they why don’t you try to improve yourself and learn new things instead of thinking that you’re frustrated?
I must disagree you related to the small number of tech writers in a company.
I am the only technical writer for an international company with over 200 people, developing varied and complex solution in teh telecom field. I would say that most of the time I try myself to find new tasks. The thing is that PMs did not send to me project documentation for review and they received negative feedback from the clients.

If the company would hire another tech writer we would not have enaough tasks to work 8h/day.

Cecily there is another way to see this aspect. Make yourself indispensable and the role will be very important. It depends to you how the others see you. I agree if you are interested in a management role you won’t have the opportunity and in this case you should search another company with a large Tech Writing department.
Best Regards

Being able to sell yourself, and what you bring to the organisation, is important, otherwise you can end up in a “ticking the box” situation (where there is no real understanding of the benefits of good documentation, so it’s very much to ‘tick the box’ of having anything at all).

Additional downsides can be a struggle to gain influence elsewhere, places YOU can see benefits but which others might be slow to realise. However on that front, there is a growing understanding of how important “information” is in the modern workplace, largely thanks to the internet.