---
title: "Guest post: Why are technical writers often treated as such an unimportant part of a company?"
date: 2020-05-31
description: "The question Guest response About the Author  The question I recently received a question from a reader asking about the..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/why-technical-writers-treated-as-unimportant/
---
# Guest post: Why are technical writers often treated as such an unimportant part of a company?
> I started my career as a writer last July. I came from technical support. I thought the support team was at the bottom of the chain at our company. Today, I stand corrected. It is definitely our tech writing team. Our company, along with many others, recently furloughed many employees. We are an international company that works in retail manufacturing. We had five technical writers with a developer to writer ratio of 43:2. They furloughed three of the five. I and one other person remain. Percentagewise, although other teams are much bigger than us, our team took the biggest hit. I can’t understand this because obviously we were so terribly understaffed to begin with. Also, our backlog was already huge. It’s not like there was no work for us. We were drowning in it. I don’t know what the ratio is now, but I know it’s bad. It is a constant uphill battle to get the resources that we need just to get our jobs done and we are often treated as last priority. I just wanted to ask you, is this normal? Are technical writers often treated as such an unimportant part of a company? Is there a common movement happening to get rid of technical writers?

## Guest response

I decided to ask Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt, who recently published some research about tech comm value in the workplace, if he was interested in writing a guest post in response to the reader’s question. Jeremy recently published [Fertile Grounds: What Interviews of Working Professionals Can Tell Us about Perceptions of Technical Communication and the Viability of Technical Communication as a Field](https://www.stc.org/techcomm/2020/03/05/fertile-grounds-what-interviews-of-working-professionals-can-tell-us-about-perceptions-of-technical-communication-and-the-viability-of-technical-communication-as-a-field/) (*Technical Communication Journal*, Feb 2020, Vol 67, No 1), so I thought he’d be the perfect one to comment. Here’s Jeremy’s response:

 **How Knowledge and Perceptions of Technical Communication Can Influence Its Utilization within Workplaces**

 From what the reader has seen so far in her organization, it’s reasonable to ask those questions. When the economy slows down, companies downsize, and when that happens, there’s uncertainty and concern (rightfully so). Those challenges aren’t unique to technical writing, yet there isn’t much consolation in knowing that when these things happen. Something that can be helpful to think about is technical writing’s status as a broader field.

 I’ve long been asking what factors influence the value that companies and individuals place on technical writing. To this end, in my research at the University of Minnesota, I’ve been asking the question, “How is technical writing perceived by people who aren’t actually technical writers?”

 There are good reasons to ask this question.

 First is the fact that, as the readers’s experience shows, technical writers typically do most of their work:

 - With people who are not technical writers

 - For people who are not technical writers (i.e., supervisors, managers, and executives)

 - In a role that supports the work of—and is often directed by—people in product-centered and/or client-facing roles (engineering, sales, project management, software development, and so on).

 To be clear, that third bullet point is *not* to say that technical writing isn’t important or that technical writers aren’t a part of integral business functions within organizations. Clearly, we *are*. In order to understand the needs of users of a certain software manual, for example, the person writing that manual will need to talk to the developers to understand how the application works. They’ll need to talk to sales and technical support people to learn more about the people using the product, and if possible, they should interview some end-users of the product to gain a better understanding of what those users need. Clearly, all of these are important business functions.