Posted by
Edward R Cole on
Jun 29, 2011; 4:09am
URL: http://elecraft.85.s1.nabble.com/Tech-Writing-tp6527667.html
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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