The tech-writer’s journal #13 — Podcast with Juliana on The Manuscript: Tech Writing around the world: India
Summary: I recently chatted with Juliana Meyer, a technical writer at VTEX and host of The Manuscript podcast, about the trends and challenges in technical writing.
Below is the description of the podcast from The Manuscript’s site:
We will be meeting tech writers around the world in this new season, so we can understand what’s the market like going beyond major tech writing hubs, and also the trends and challenges that tech writers in different countries face.
In this episode, we travel to India to interview Sneha Sridharan, technical writer at commercetools, formerly working at Zoho.
Listen here:
Transcript
I also created a transcript of the podcast below. (Juliana’s questions are in bold; my responses are in normal font.)
Introduction
Hi there!
Welcome to the Manuscript. I am Juliana Meyer, and in this podcast, we are passionate about writing and technology. Every couple of weeks, we talk to people making a difference in the intersection of writing and the development of technology products; covering technical and UX writing, product development, art & design, content strategy, and anywhere else there is someone thinking about content in digital products and the tech industry.
If you are new here, welcome!
If you are a regular listener, welcome back!, and I bet you’ve noticed that we have a new intro song! I personally think it is very cool. It transmits our futuristic and modern vibe, along with a Brazilian twist that I really like. In fact, we released a thread on Twitter, interviewing André Josias and Dannyel Simão, our sound mixers about the process of creating this new tune. So, go check that out!
We are starting a brand new season and we also have brand new Twitter content to give a full experience for everyone listening and some more behind-the-scenes details and we will be hopefully posting episodes every week or so. So we can finish 2021 together listening to more stories about tech and writing. So welcome to season 2 of The Manuscript.
Section 1
And today we are very excited because we are taking a trip to India!
So, me being from Brazil and everything, I really think it is important to have this multi-cultural perspective on tech writing because most of the content is usually produced in western Europe and The United States which is great. We have great content being produced there and we have had people from those regions on the show before to listen to what they have to say. But also to have that plurality of perspectives and to understand what are the challenges and opportunities of technical writing in other areas is really cool and it is something that I wanna do more from now on. So, if you are a tech writer from a different country, and are just going on with your business, and actually wanna talk about it, send us an email at themanuscriptpodcast@gmail.com. This is actually how I met Sneha who will be our guest on the show today. She is a tech writer from India and also a listener for The Manuscript.
So, hey Sneha! how are you doing?
Hi Juliana, I am good, how are you?
Super great! Sneha, can you please tell me how to pronounce your last name, just to make sure that I am saying it correctly?
Sure, it is Sridharan; Sneha Sridharan.
Sridharan, is that cool?
Yes.
All right, basically, this episode, we are gonna talk about Sneha’s career and how she got into tech writing. Then, we are gonna talk about how tech writing is happening in India and its particularities, and we are gonna close things off by asking some thoughts about tech writing in general and some really hot topics that have been discussed in our area.
Cool, so without further adieu, let us start.
So, first of all, Sneha, can you please introduce yourself and share with our listeners a little bit about your path?
Yeah, sure. So, I am Sneha Sridharan. I am a Technical Writer based in India, and I am 24 years old. I live in a city called Chennai, in India. I am a computer science graduate. I have three years of professional experience. I graduated in the year of 2018.
So, a little bit about my career, I started off in customer support. I worked in my first company as a customer support executive for about 3–4 months, and then I moved to another role as a full-time writer in an ed-tech startup. And then I found this wonderful career path called technical writing, and now I am about two years into this field. Yeah, that is my career in a nut-shell.
As Juliana said, I am a big fan of The Manuscript podcast. As the pandemic started here, I had a lot of time in hand, and I wanted to just try all the tech writing podcasts. And try if I can use that to learn more about technical writing and The Manuscript was the first podcast i stumbled upon and I have been a fan of this podcast ever since.
Sneha, I told you this before we started recording, but we don’t usually get that many fan mails. So, your email to me just really made my day and I was super glad to have that connection and to actually know that there are people out there listening to what we talk about here on the show. So, really thankful for that.
I am glad that I sent out that email. I never thought I would get any response actually. But yeah, that email actually created our friendship so I am thankful for sending that email.
Yeah, I actually refresh The Manuscript’s email page like on a regular basis, just to make sure that I am not missing out any emails. So don’t worry about that. If you, listening to us, want to send us an email, I will promise that I will answer you and we will start a friendship overseas, just like me and Sneha have been doing.
All right, but going back to tech writing, I really wanna dive a bit deeper into that discovery, that leap from customer service to tech writing. So, how did that happen exactly? Was there a position open in the company and you just thought of trying that out? How did it go?
Sure, so, when I joined my first company I was still a college student. I was still interning in that company. I was so fortunate that I was given the opportunity to try different tasks, and be a part of different teams. So, I was just testing and trying every job or task that I could get my hands on just to figure out what I like the most and to figure out in which direction my career should be in. And that’s when I got the opportunity to create a guide for one of our partners. Actually, it is a point of sale software, and I actually got the opportunity to create a complete guide for our partner. I actually really liked doing that and I thought I wanted to do this full-time. At that point, they did not have an opening for a documentarian there. So, I had to move to an ed-tech startup as a full-time writer.
In that company, the role was more pivoted towards research than towards writing. And then I discovered tech writing. It was actually a perfect combination of technology and writing, my two big interests. It was a great combination of these two and I was really happy to find it, so I moved to tech writing.
Awesome! that sounds like something that I see in the Brazilian market quite often. We had people here interviewed in the show previously that moved from customer support roles and dove deep into tech writing. So, it is cool to know that we have that thing in common even though we are miles and miles away; actually, kilometres and kilometres away, because in Brazil we say kilometres.
You have a background in computer science like you said, which is kind of rare for Brazilian tech writers on the other hand. Usually, people either come from journalism or any different area really. So in the team where I work, there is me from business administration, but we have people from library studies, and also international relations, and engineering, mechatronics engineering, electrical engineering. So it is quite a diverse background. But you come from computer science, how does that happen? Is this a thing in India? Or how does that help in your day-to-day?
I wouldn’t say it’s a thing in India. But, even here, technical writers are from really different backgrounds. As you said, there are people from journalism, there are people from literature, there are even people from commerce backgrounds working as technical writers. Even here, finding computer science graduates as technical writers is quite rare, I think I am one of those. To answer your question, it does help a lot. And, knowing the basics of computers and understanding the basics of software development really helps you understand developers better. As you know, the main thing you need to create a good documentation is understanding the concept that you are documenting well, and another pillar would be understanding your users. Understanding the technical concept better will be much easier if you are from a computer science background. But again, even if you’re from a different background, it totally depends on your skills to understand complicated technical concepts.
That’s very true. We all have something to chip in on our day-to-day as tech writers, our background. Talking a little bit more about your career as well, on previous experience, you have written corporate video scripts and recorded how-to guides for features. Can you tell us a little bit about those projects?
Sure. As I mentioned previously, I was just an intern when I joined my first firm. I was working mainly as part of the customer support team. At that point the company was going through a transformation. They initially had online help, which as actually the online help pages. They wanted to move to a video library kind of support. When I had joined, they just had phone and email support and they wanted to move to a more digital form of support. They wanted to have a live chat button, and allow all their customers to get support from that live chat button. They wanted to build a bot where the robot itself gives them the relevant support that would help them. I was really fortunate to be a part of the project right from inception till its release and to get to see the reaction of customers when you force them to move from one form of support to another. It was really very interesting and I got to learn a lot more about customer support, how they handle users, and all that.
That is such a hot topic for our area, like how videos interact with our written content. I am actually planning on doing an entire episode dedicated to that topic. So, I won’t dive so deep into this conversation right now. But thank you so much for sharing your insights. That was a really cool project.
But, I am also curious to know more about your day-to-day.
It is pretty much like any technical writer. There are many phases a technical document goes through before it gets published. So, my day involves, a little bit of drafting new documents, a little bit of peer-reviewing the existing documents that my peers have shared. Or interviewing the developers or the product managers. It is a little bit of everything and also depends upon the release cycles and the priorities. And apart from this, along with technical writing, I think I’ve seen this more in India, that there is less differentiation between technical writing and developer relations.
In most of the companies, technical writers also take care of developer relations. It is the same in my firm as well. So we also take care of developer engagement like creating podcasts, creating webinars, and you know, finding out different ways to engage our developers.
That pretty much sounds like my day of work. So it is really cool to hear.
Section 2
We are entering a new section in our episode. And this section actually came from our previous conversation that we had, where we didn’t record anything but I was really curious to really understand what were the differences between tech writing in Brazil and tech writing in India. If the challenges that I faced in hiring new tech writers or establishing processes were the same ones that Sneha faced. So we are kind of bringing those questions that we had on our friendly chat into this episode. To really talk about, so basically, how are things going on in tech writing business over there. So Sneha, tell us, what is the usual profile of an Indian tech writer? You said that computer science is not really the common that you have, journalists. But what is their background or area of expertise in most cases?
I think that in most of the cases, I’ve seen many people from journalism moving into tech writing. And I’ve seen people with literature backgrounds moving into tech writing a lot. These two are more common. I don’t know if it is true with only respect to India, but as far as I’ve seen, people from journalism and literature are moving to the tech writing space a lot. And honestly, I think, the academic background is not very important when it comes to tech writing. I read this in a blog. I am not sure if I am quoting it correctly. I will just paraphrase it for you. It is that for a technical writer, there is really no traditional academic or work background that is necessary. What is important is that you can write clearly, and you can interpret code, and you can learn complicated technical concepts through a combination of doing research yourself or asking the correct questions and extracting the information from the SME.
Yeah, that’s very true. We have had John Paz, who is a tech writer at Menlo and previously worked for Atlassian here on the show. And it was really interesting to see his perspective on that as well because he does not come from a technical background but he sees it as a superpower. So being a non-techie, as he calls it, actually works out on his day-to-day. And, reading Christopher Gale and the Splunk team’s book, The Product is Docs, this is also something they mention in the chapter about hiring. It is that they look more soft skills in tech writers as opposed to really focussing on technical backgrounds. So it is cool to see that trend which brings more accessibility to the field at the end of the day because, we’re opening worlds to the technology world to people who haven’t exactly used new technology, which is great.
How do you learn how to become tech writers? Is there a university course or any format of formal education pathways or is it more learning by doing?
I would vote for learning by doing because I myself am from a technical background and I did not have any idea about technical writing when I joined as a technical writer in my firm. And pretty much whatever I know about technical writing is the one that I learned on the job. But there are many courses available like diploma and certificate courses in different universities like Arizona State and Oregon university and all that. And you can always learn from the digital learning platforms like Coursera and Udemy but there is no formal course or university degree that you can do to become a technical writer. There is one called Master of Science in Technical Communication, and that’s pretty much it.
Yeah, I feel that we face the same thing here in Brazil as well. We do not have a course on technical communication in most universities and people just land in the area and just learn as they go through online courses or blogs, podcasts, etc.
No matter how much you get to learn from the university courses that you do, it is not comparable to the knowledge that you can gain by actually taking up technical writing tasks and publishing documents.
Very true. Thanks for sharing that. But I am also curious, is there a local market for tech writing, or do tech writers work remotely for foreign companies there?
Yeah, there is a lot of local market for technical writing, and I would say it’s equal. There are a lot of opportunities in India itself and there are many Indians who work remotely for foreign companies. It is very difficult to find a technical writer, so the demand is more and the supply is less when it comes to India.
Yes, we have exactly the same thing here in Brazil. So my feeling is that companies have awakened to the importance of tech writing for like two years ago. So, now there is this race to get tech writers who have experience on the market but on the other hand there aren’t as many tech writers available with that experience that they require. So we are in the midst of a real awakening of the Brazilian tech writing market and gaining traction and more and more companies hiring and so there is lots of opportunities within Brazil, which is really cool.
What are some challenges you notice for the areas of development in India and on the other hand, what are the advantages compared to other countries that you see?
So, challenges in technical writing, I would say are finding the right people for the job is actually very difficult. Because most of them who have a technical background choose to be in more technical roles like development or testing or automation and things like that and people with good communication skills gravitate towards the roles that have more scope for writing such as copywriting or UX writing or things like that. So it is really difficult to find technical writers who have equal amounts of passion for technology as well as writing. It has actually become even more difficult to find people because of the pandemic and moving towards the remote culture has become very difficult. Also, it is very difficult to assess the skills that are required. You cannot ask a technical writer to tech-savvy enough to actually build an application and you cannot ask them to write a whole guide as well. You cannot ask them to spend 5–6 hours to write a complete guide. Assessing the candidates or the technical writers that come in is also difficult and because of that it is very difficult to find people as well.
That is very true. Since you mentioned hiring, do you feel that there are any challenges or particularities when hiring tech writers besides those that you just discussed? So, to give an example, here in Brazil, we have to teach our candidates what tech writing is. This is not such an established career that people actively engage with our hiring spots. We have to recruit people or the ones who actually land on our job opportunities aren’t necessarily aware of what is tech writing what is their day-to-day. So, there is lot of educating this audience that will be future tech writers about what it is and telling them exactly what are the day-to-day processes so that they understand if that’s something they will have an affinity with. If that’s something that they will like doing in the first place. So it is kind of tough.
Yeah, it is the same situation here as well. Because as I said, the demand is more, and the supply of good technical writers is less. So, you cannot expect to always hire people who are actually, you know, experienced in this field, and mostly when they come in, we’ll have to start educating them about technical writing from scratch. It is always a learning curve, and it takes about 6–9 months to actually complete that learning curve and to actually start contributing to the team’s tasks. It takes that much time to hire someone, and educate them, train them, and enable them to be a valuable asset to the team.
Yeah, we feel the same way. But something that is really helping out in this movement of awareness towards our area is the tech writing community here in Brazil that was just kind of accelerated last year between Breno, our former co-host of the show, Maddy and Jes, who are Brazilian tech writers as well. So we kind of got together and started calling other tech writers from all over Brazil, so we could learn with each other and produce content in Portuguese, which didn’t happen previously. That kind of ignited a really cool movement in the area here in Brazil which is also contributing in making the market more aware of the importance of the tech writers’ role, and all other consequences that we didn’t even see as part of the birth of this community. Do you have something similar in India? Do you have like a tech writing community there? Do you know other professionals in the fields? Do you produce content in your native languages, promote webinars or events? or do you mostly consume what is being produced in other countries?
We do have a tech writing community here, it is called tech writers tribe. It was started sometime last year, just to create awareness about technical writing and to educate people about the practices and the different opportunities that we have in this field. We do not produce content in our native language because India is really really huge and each state has its own language so it would be difficult. This community is common for all the technical writers in India so, we have English as our common language. So that everyone will be able to understand and benefit from that.
But that is not a barrier because just this week we had a really cool discussion in the Brazilian tech writing community of how having all the technology content basically being produced in English is a barrier to having more Brazilians engage with our profession. Although depending upon your status or your socio-economic situation, of-course, you’re going to learn English, but that’s not the case for most of the population. So that kind of is a barrier for other people to join this career. But I guess that English is more equally taught in India, is that it?
Yes, most of them will be able to speak and understand English. So the language would not be a bigger concern. So we decided that we’ll stick with English.
That’s like a philosophical question that I sometimes face myself because, I think a lot about how to contribute to the tech writing community here in Brazil. Having an English language podcast is not exactly opening doors for people who aren’t already familiarised with this language. But also there is the catch of wanting to reach beyond the Brazilian borders, and reaching other professionals all over the world who have so much to share. So, yeah, I sometimes think about that.
Section 3
So, we are entering our episode’s final section before the closing. So, just wanted to throw around some thoughts on technical writing starting with how do you see the adoption of docs-as-code in companies where you’ve worked at? Is this a topic that’s being discussed amongst your colleagues from the tech writing tribe?
Yes, docs-as-code is still really something very new in the tech comm space here in India. People are really still very confused about what this approach is and how to implement it. Even in my current firm, we are still looking at ways to implement docs-as-code as part of our documentation. So it is still very new. Just like any other new thing that comes out, people are really reluctant about it, because it totally changes how you produce documentation, right from the tools that you use, to how you allow the documentation to be reviewed by the peers and the editors and to how the documentation will be published. Considering its impact, people are still very reluctant about it, but I think docs-as-code will really grow and it will become the norm at least in another 5–6 years.
Cool. For some companies, there are blurred lines between instructional design, tech writing, and customer support. Did that occur in your career in any way?
Yes, a lot of times. At the end of the day, no matter what you do, whether you are designing instruction or whether you are doing a documentation for a feature or product or you are in customer support; all you’re trying to do is to educate the user about something- a product, or how to use a product. So I think that commonality is admissible if that’s the right word for it. I was working in customer support, but I was given an opportunity to write a guide for a partner, and to create how-to videos, create feature videos, or product-related videos.
So the final question for this segment. What’s the thing that you find the most fun about a tech writer’s career? Like what do you like most about what we do?
The most fun part would be to learn a new technology every single day and get paid for it. yeah, that would be my favourite part.
Yes, this is the answer I give people.
Being a technical writer mostly is about learning new tech, and having the ability to learn it really fast. So you get to learn cool stuff about technology, and also get paid for it. So that would be the most fun part about being a technical writer.
Exactly, this is exactly how I feel. We get paid to learn, and that is amazing that there is a whole industry of people who can do that. It is a really cool day-to-day. It is something that really motivates me at the end of our routines because the actual day-to-day can sometimes be quite challenging and I was wondering what is the most challenging aspect for you?
The most challenging aspect, I would say, is deciding how much is too much to put into a guide. This confusion of deciding how much is too much can be solved up to some extent by doing deep user analysis. However, I still find it to be the most challenging part. If you leave out some information, there is a particular set of users that you’re not addressing to and if you give too much information there is a part of users that might get bored because of that extensive detailing. So, I find this to be the most challenging part of being a technical writer.
Yeah, there is definitely a sweet spot of how deep we should go with our documentation. For me, I feel that the most difficult challenge which is also something that really excites me on the other hand may be because of my personality is how we have to build bridges between other teams in order to do our jobs. Like, I feel that 50% of my work is building relationships and building bridges and keeping them well-founded so that we are trusted by developers and product managers and also get what we need from them on a daily basis. So the PR aspect of our job is quite challenging, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort, but its also really cool. Especially, if you like the people who you’re working with.
That is so true. I often feel that technical writing is more of a personality-driven career. You’ll have to be able to create that kind of a connection with the developers, like every single time you meet them to get the information that you need and also not irritate them and throw them off the track.
Yeah, that’s very cool. Do you wanna bring up any other question or something that was on your mind with what we talked about?
I think we’ve covered everything.
Alright, So I feel that this episode, I also interviewed myself because I also answered some questions, because I really wanted to get that perspective of how things are working at least in Brazil. And it was such a rich experience for me Sneha, to have this conversation with you. And I really enjoyed how we’ve connected through this show. It is like one of the unexpected opportunities or doors that open once you start a personal project, which is really cool.
I would like to thank you for inviting me to this podcast. I really enjoyed having this conversation. I did get a lot of insights about how technical writing is in Brazil. Thank you so much.
Cool, but although we have finished our questions about tech writing and tech writing in India and Brazil, we also have two questions left on our show which is the question that we always ask our guests so, first of all, this is the moment where we ask our guest on their thoughts on the future of their respective areas. So Sneha, what trends do you see for the future of tech writing in India, since it is a themed episode.
So, there are quite a few, but off the top of my head, as I said docs-as-code is something that is here to stay and no matter how confused we are about this topic about its implementation, I believe this is going to stay in the tech comm space for a very long time. Apart from that, technical writing is something that gets evolved through every passing year, from the tools that we use to produce and publish documentation. So in the tools space, I think there’ll be a lot of changes. So, yes, these two are the things I can pull off the top of my head.
Awesome, and final question, we have another block on our podcast, which is book recommendations. So, if you’re not aware, The Manuscript actually assembled a Goodreads bookshelf with all of our guests book recommendations. So, you can check that out on the show notes or on our website. But Sneha, what book is currently on your nightstand, what are you reading right now? And what book or article would you recommend to our listeners so they can learn more about tech writing.
Currently, related to tech writing, I am reading this book called Everybody Writers by Ann Handley. It is a really cool book. It is a good book for everyone who is trying to transition from technical writing to developer advocate kind of role or who is trying to move from the traditional tech writing space to a more marketing-oriented writing space. I really like this book, I’ve enjoyed it so far. The one book that I would recommend to everyone is The Every Page is Page One book. Actually, I got to know about this book through The Manuscript podcast. I had absolutely no idea about technical writing, when I tried to learn more about things, I stumbled upon The Manuscript podcast, and the very first episode was the interview of the author of the book Mark Baker.
It was our first episode, I was not even interviewing people yet, just working on the backstage. It was just Breno’s, it was a really cool episode though.
I loved that episode, and that’s how I got to know about that book. That is one book I’d recommend to every technical writer.
Ah, there are tears in my eyes right now. You have no idea how glad this makes me feel. Because I learn so much from these interviews. I cannot describe how happy this makes me feel to know that other people are also getting enriched by the topics that we talk here on The Manuscript. That is cool.
You are doing a great job, Juliana.
Thank you! It is great to have that positive feedback, especially on personal projects to which you are pretty much a volunteer, and have that discipline and clarity of why are you doing this because I have another job. But it is great. It is fuelling me to keep going with our work.
I think this is it for our episode. How are you feeling?
I bit tired, but yeah, how are you feeling?
Exactly as I said, I am so excited that this happened. I am super glad. Thank you so much again, Sneha for all of this, you’re awesome.
Thank you!
