What experience do you have spinning up automation tools?
Sigiloso
What does "spin up automation tools" mean? It was never described in detail, only vaguely asked (twice). What's the value in having a Technical Writer working to automate things? What kind of things need to be automated? How can I appropriately address that question when the context is missing? The word "automate" doesn't appear anywhere in the job description, and it was never clear what Jan was asking about. Automating things, especially for Technical Writers, is an exercise in cost-benefit analysis. In many cases, the time it takes to automate a monotonous can be just as well spent by doing the task and moving on. It felts unfair to ask such a question without providing the use case and context over the kind of tasks Tech Writers encounter that would require automation in the first place. What really feels unfair is that I answered the question, but it was never revealed what kind of automation might be required, so my answer wasn't enough, but I didn't understand the scope of the question in the first place. Maybe I could have done better to ask what kind of tasks do Tech Writers need to automate, and why a dev wouldn't be a better person to provide such automation. But to me, it's pretty clear that Tech Writers pitch in where they can to provide customer value, and automating most aspects of daily work for Tech Writers doesn't lend itself to much automation. It's why creating bots to write documentation hasn't caught on yet, and won't for a long time. The work we do tends to be softer, squishier, and more of an art than a science.