Man Page Writing: Life/Times of Man Page Writer

When I started at Digital Research in the early 80s, most engineers had hardware backgrounds. They were the guys (and it was an even more male-skewed group than you'd find today) who, as kids, took apart their parents' TV sets. They tended to know whole systems (which, of course, was easier to do in, say, 1983, than today), from CPU to low-level OS, up to user interface. Assembly language was more commonly used than it is today. Many programmers felt they had to write their own compilers. A couple of the best engineers were auto-didacts who had little or no college.

A lot of software types in my early days were unconventional people--musicians or other types of artists. This might still be true, but I'm less conscious of it.

At some point, in the mid 80s, when I was at Xerox, I became conscious of software engineering as a college degree and as a profession. I began to meet engineers who knew only programming languages (and not the hardware) and who had gone into the profession because it looked like it had a great future, not necessarily because they were enchanted by software. There were even those engineers who weren't strong math students, who'd taken the bare minimum of math to get their C.S. degrees.

Over time, software engineering has become further detached from the nuts and bolts of the hardware (except, of course, for device driver writers). Where 15 years ago, I might look askance at an engineer who had no grasp of the hardware on which his program ran, nothing like that thought would strike me today. Today you could have a veritable Beethoven of software programming who'd have no clearer idea of the science of the hardware than he would of his car's catalytic converter.

Tech writing changed even more dramatically than engineering. When I started in 1982, it was not widely thought of as a profession. Expectations of technical knowledge were low. I might uncharitably characterize it (then) as a form of welfare for people with non-marketable majors (such as I, BA, English; MA, Creative Writing).

Much more is expected of tech writers today than was true 20 years ago (as one would hope). For one thing, it has been blessed by academia: Now you can get a degree in tech writing from big-name schools. For another, competition for jobs is much, much tougher. My brother (12 years younger than me) looked for a tech writing job a couple of years ago. Employers' expectations then was that you'd know some combination of a compliled language (C, C++), a scripting language (Perl), and have mastered the mechanics of web publication. In addition, you'd have a grasp of a complex system, such as a programming environment or an operating system. All of this was on top of writing competence.

Today, my relation to my job is analogous to my relation to my house (in the SF Bay Area): I'd probably neither be hired for the former, nor could afford the latter.