Revisiting “How many technical writers should we have in our organisation?”

We received an email today:

Having read your paper titled ‘How many technical writers should we have in our organisation?’,  I was wondering if you ever did the follow up the final results from you survey as mentioned in the paper and if they are available?

This refers to an article we wrote in 2003, where we looked at research on ‘standard’ ratios between developers and Technical Authors. We said we’d Cherryleaf would be producing a report on the final results from our survey this summer, but we didn’t obtain any new information that needed to be added to our preliminary report.

Have things changed since 2003?

There are some software tools for automating the creation of some API documentation, and organisations that have moved from Microsoft Word to a component-based content management system are likely to need to spend less time on the “look and feel” and formatting of the published content. However, we doubt these have had a major effect on the productivity of technical communicators.

An alternative way to determine the ratio

There is another way to look at the ratio of technical communicators to programmers – one we didn’t discuss in our original report. You could use the job sites to look at the total number of vacancies for programmers and the total number of technical communicators, and generate a rough-and-ready ratio that way.

It’s a rough estimate, because the job sites contain duplicate vacancies (a job can be advertised by more than one agency) and job titles can vary.

Looking at the reed.co.uk site today, there are currently 134 vacancies for Technical Authors and 761 vacancies for Programmers. That suggests a ratio of 17.6% , or roughly one in six technical communicators to programmers.

What do you think?

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