The ugly shadow world of MathWorks documentation - Recensione dipendente - Technical Writer presso MathWorks

The technical writing and documentation (doc) management and organization have some serious issues, which outweighed the positives for me at the company. Although you work with a product team for all of your writing work, you are managed by a doc manager from outside the product team, who has little expertise in your subject matter. Talking to them in weekly meetings can feel incredibly pointless and unhelpful, depending on your manager. These weekly meetings, and most of your interactions with your manager, are about enforcement, not support: making sure you are doing your job. Management insists that new documentation projects have a requirements analysis process that is far too heavyweight. Management constantly emphasizes the need for requirements analysis, aiming to create better documentation, but they wind up obsessing far more over the process than they do over the product. Basically, to write new documentation, you have to fill out a huge amount of paperwork first. Much, much more than the software engineers even do, which is downright silly. Your productivity can feel incredibly stifled by the paperwork. This process probably saves the bottom 10% of writers, who need the paperwork to know what they're doing, but for the other 90%, it makes your job probably two or three times as tedious and provides little value. Most of the emphasis of the doc group, outside of your day to day tasks, is on following processes and guidelines .. and creating new guidelines. There are endless guidelines for endless different tasks, with the stated aim of bringing consistency and high quality to the writing. In reality, if you're already a capable and competent writer, than these guidelines and processes wind up fostering a culture of intense micromanagement and control. There are guidelines for the most basic of tasks, like writing examples (does someone need to know guidelines for how to write and document a hello world example?) There is an enormous database of policies, procedures, and guidelines, and writers are given special projects to constantly expand and develop new guidelines. The way that first-line managers treat their writers is wildly inconsistent. Some of them let their writers mostly do their own thing, whereas other managers are control freaks and want things done exactly their way. There are good managers and bad managers. Some of them are friendly, supportive, and helpful. Others seem to mainly be self-serving, looking to further their own career, squash disagreement, minimize time investment, and make sure you are a good horse for their work cart. There are endless tiers of doc managers, who often seem to contribute little as they have basically no writing duties. The number of new managers is constantly growing, and there are many, many managers with many different sub-managers. All this makes the key staff, the writers, seem grossly undervalued and underappreciated. Great writing and documentation product is rarely if ever singled out for praise. The emphasis is all on following processes and guidelines and making your (multiple) managers happy. Many of the more senior doc writers have little to no technical background. Which is not a problem in and of itself, but shows that the culture has had a strange evolution. Jack the CEO or someone higher up clearly let go of the doc infrastructure at some point and handed it off to somebody else and (mostly) forgot about it. Working at doc at MathWorks can be like working in a strange shadow world, supposedly paired with the product teams but shackled to an huge and dominating, extremely bureaucratic organization.