how LISP changed my professional life

[cellio]

Part of this meme:
LISP
The most valuable part of my education as a technical writer was my

Comments

[merle_]

In a lot of places, tech writers are not part of the development process (and may not even be in the development department) and the attitude is that they can come in after the big boys are done developing the product.

I would venture to extend it to most places. It's sad because there should be a nice triangle of interaction between devs, tech writers, and QA. One place I worked at had it under the covers (because I implemented a subnet of trust and information sharing); one had it mostly in place when I started; all others.. nope.

[cellio]

I've done or encouraged the same thing in several places -- tech writers and QA are natural allies.

[merle_]

And IT, which I failed to mention. At any job I try to find someone willing to trade knowledge across and we leak "secrets" to each other. It works greatly for the profit of the company.

Many developers do not understand this. It could be blamed on the way CS is taught (where you write your own code in a vacuum) but if so then the teaching is wrong.

[evil_baron]

I spent 20+ years doing technical writing (systems, electronics, telecom, etc) and training. Put me through school for CMPENG, and expanded the range of my experience exponentially over what I would have had without it.

This lead to other careers and opportunities over time. Once, this company was looking for a COBOL programmer (Y2K) and when they asked if I could do it, I said it was just another language. "But, can you program COBOL?"

[cellio]

Ah, the people who don't understand how skills work. I hope you said "yes" and collected a Y2K premium. :-)