[Elecraft] Tech Writing

[Edward R. Cole]

Deja Vu:

My first job after graduating college was for Hughes Aircraft Tech 
Manuals.  It was almost the end of my career.  But fortunately I was 
laid-off in the great engineering purge of spring 1971.  For years a 
recurring nightmare was that I was back working at "TM".

I actually did learn a little about writing procedures that was a 
help many years later.  I mostly wrote fault-isolation trees and 
procedures.  Hughes was fond of handing you a schematic with no title 
and no idea of what the function was, and asking for a 
troubleshooting procedure.  I pity the poor swabs that had to read 
and follow them.  I did once hear back the they took the manual and 
tore out the schematics and tossed the rest of the manual.

I was lucky - I got canned.  That led to a job in microwave 
engineering with NASA.  Ten years later I walked out of that career 
and moved to Alaska without a job, lived in a bare cabin in the 
woods, bought some sled dogs, and loved it...never looked back.  Ten 
years of that and I got back into the working world, for the last 20-years.

73, Ed - KL7UW

On 6/25/2011 8:16 AM, Tony Estep wrote:

 > Ah, I was once a manual writer. I ran out of money while going to college
 > and took a job writing manuals for a small engineering firm that made
 > transistor testers for Texas Instruments. Later, after I went back and
 > finished school, I was looking for a job and applied at a big electronics
 > company in St. Louis. The guy who interviewed me informed me that most of
 > the applicants had submitted writing samples that were unintelligible, and
 > the few whose writing passed muster couldn't figure out how the equipment
 > worked, so they didn't know what to say. He unrolled a huge, blue-line,
 > hand-drawn schematic and pointed to one of the stages. "What's that?" he
 > demanded. "Schmitt trigger," sez I. Whereupon he jumped up and began
 > gleefully pumping my hand. "Hooray!"
 >
 > But after I got home and thought about it, I realized that the last thing in
 > the world I wanted to do was to write those manuals, and I wound up going in
 > a completely opposite direction.
 >
 > Tony KT0NY



73, Ed - KL7UW, WD2XSH/45
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