TechCommGeekMom

How should Brett decide which of his two job offers to accept — or whether to reject them both and keep looking? Here’s the test every new job offer must pass — or else you don’t want the job!

Source: Never, Ever Take A Job Unless It Passes This Test

While this article is written to be generic and apply to almost any job, it definitely applies to technical communications jobs.  I know, from experience, that sometimes you might only have one job offer, and you question whether you should take it, only because it’s something rather than nothing.  But I think some of the author’s big points hit home, which include whether you are going to enjoy doing the tasks expected, learn something, have opportunity to grow, and if you get along with the people you’ve interviewed with. Now, the last one is tricky. I had interviews with people, and then never worked with them, and ended up working with someone else I didn’t get along with as well.  And sometimes, all of it will not align. For example, I walked away from some other potentially lucrative opportunities that I was being considered for to take the one that I’m at now. It’s been three months since I was given the job offer and said yes, but I am still having serious connectivity issues to company network systems so that I can do my work. Do I blame the people who hired me? No. They have been honest and transparent that much of the work to set me up is out of their control, and they’ve gone to great lengths to get me set up as much as they can and keep me working. I finally met them the other day, and despite the computer networking issues, I’m glad I took this job. I like the people, the work sounds exciting, and I think there will definitely be room for growth. Doesn’t hurt that I got an hourly pay raise out of it as well.

It’s not easy making choices in today’s job market. The “perfect” job isn’t out there. But, I think that the guidelines listed here in this article are good ones, and they are ones that I had to learn organically from experience.

What do you think? Include your comments below.

–TechCommGeekMom

In a year filled with hot-button issues, we look forward to seeing where 2018 will take our workplace conversations.

Source: Five Workplace Issues We’ll Be Talking About In 2018

Ironically enough, I talked about four of the five issues mentioned in this article in 2017. I did hear more about the fifth items along the way, but having been…underemployed…for most of the year, it was difficult for me to comment on it if I wasn’t too deeply involved in it. The best resource was the Adobe DITA Virtual Conference from this past fall. Lots of talk about it there. But otherwise, all these issues in general were the hot topics of 2017, if you ask me, and the conversations are only continuing into 2018 because they are mostly issues that aren’t resolved.

What do you think of these workplace issues for 2018? Include your comments below.

–TechCommGeekMom

Women filled computer-programming jobs in the U.S. and U.K. after World War II, but as government and business professionalized programming, the decline of female coders began.

Find the full article at the Wall Street Journal

If nothing else happened in 2017, this has been a year where women started to assert themselves more into society in a push that hasn’t been seen in decades. In the process of doing so, we are reminding ourselves of where we have been, where we are, and where we should be.  Women in tech has always been a topic of interest here at TechCommGeekMom, because there is a generation (namely mine) that essentially got shut out because our predecessors got shut out.  We found some other ways to work around it, but not always. We need to learn from our history (which is spelled out well in this Wall Street Journal article), and see what we can do to change this. There is no reason whatsoever for the technical field not to be equal between men and women in the workforce doing the same jobs. None.

Think of it like this–they don’t say that “Mother Necessity” is the reason for invention for nothing, right? Women have often been the inspiration for technical advance, and even a few super smart ones were able to break those barriers to the world’s advantage. So why would you want to lock them out?

It is not only up to women to fight for their right to work equally in the tech field, but it’s up to men who understand and appreciate that women are perfectly capable of doing the same jobs for equal pay as well.

What do you think? Include your comments below.

–TechCommGeekMom

Research shows that office workers cannot concentrate at their desks.

Source: Remote Workers Are Outperforming Office Workers–Here’s Why

April Showalter had liked this article on LinkedIn, and I can see why. I totally agree as well! This is an argument that I’ve been making for a long time now, if you’ve been reading many of my postings for the last couple of years.  Most of us really don’t need the flashy stuff. We need an environment that’s conducive to us getting our work done, and we need flexibility.  Just today, my doctor called me and said I had to come over for some overdue tests. I wasn’t doing much this morning, and the doctor is only five minutes away, so I was able to schedule that in. There are other times I need that flexibility due to my family responsibilities or my STC duties (I often have to leave a little early for chapter meetings since I live far away, and usually have to battle rush-hour traffic around Philadelphia.) When I’m working from home as a remote worker, I can usually get SO much more done, because I actually have fewer distractions. I can be here to have lunch with my son when he has a day off from school. I can take a quick break and greet him when he gets home from school. And I still get all the work done.

So, if this article isn’t more proof that companies should seriously consider hiring remote workers, than I don’t know what the problem is, other than backward thinking in the digital 21st century.

What do you think? Include your comments below.

–TechCommGeekMom

 

The job of a technical writer is to translate complex information into words that a non-technical/non-scientific person can understand and use. Now at

Source: The Best Technical Writers are Not Techie at All

Thanks to Dave Gardner for finding this and posting it on LinkedIn.

This is an argument that I’ve made to prospective employers and recruiters time and time again.  Having a little technical knowledge helps, but ultimately it’s hard to find people who have the same super technical knowledge they require AND can write about technical things. I’ve often thought as technical writers almost like translators; we translate English into English. We make the complicated less complicated. We shouldn’t have to be former programmers/developers, post-doctoral scientists, or whatever else requires very specific knowledge to write. We just need to know how to write, to write well, and decipher the hard stuff.  As Dave Gardner, the person who originally posted this on his LinkedIn feed said in his own commentary, “Find a candidate who is a quick study — someone who can ramp up quickly in your technology and who can translate that technology into understandable content for your end-audience.”  I don’t think I could have phrased this better myself. (Thanks, Dave!)

What do you think? Include your comments below.

–TechCommGeekMom