Is being a technical writer a good career choice?

From what I've seen, there's more career progression with software engineering because there are more impactful decisions that have to be made as you progress up the engineering ladder. There's a larger group of people that you have impact on, so there are more career levels in the engineering ladder. I imagine because there are more levels and scope, there is probably a higher ceiling for pay, too.

If you have passion for both domains, focusing on software engineering may be the more flexible option because you can dive into the nitty gritty implementation and write about it with more clarity and precision. You can parlay your engineering experience into writing for your company's technical blog, improving the internal documentation, or writing for your own Substack.

Hopefully, there's a technical writer lurking the the discussions that can give you another perspective!

As a technical writer, Your career and compensation growth will be much slower. If you can do either, I strongly recommend you pick software engineering.

Let me start by dispelling the myth that software engineering has less writing. Especially at the higher levels, I'd argue the majority of the job is writing! You need to write in almost every capacity of the job:

• A lot of the job will be to advocate or communicate engineering plans, and this is mostly done via writing.
• System designs for large, impactful systems will require clear writing about the assumptions, constraints, and requirements.
• As you become more senior, more of your time will be spent in code review. This requires writing more English than code.

The main difference is that a technical writer will likely be writing documentation or explainers that are more external and for more stable products. But rest assured that you can still exercise your writing muscle as a SWE.

On top of this, let me explain why software engineering has major advantages compared to technical writing:

1. You get paid (a lot) more. I don't recall exact numbers, but I believe tech writers at Meta had 40-50% less total comp (TC) compared to the same level of SWE. Most of the difference was b/c writers received much less equity: tech writers simply cannot command comparable equity in the market.
2. You have more opportunity for career progression. There are many more engineers than writers, probably a ratio of 100:1 in Big Tech cos. With so many more engineers, you'll have many more "slots" to get promoted, become a manager, or transition to new teams.
3. You have way more optionality as a software engineer. A startup will never hire a technical writer in the early days, but they're often strapped for engineering talent. It's easy to go from SWE to tech writer, but the other way around is much harder.
4. Finally, I think the job of a tech writer is actually at risk of automation. AI agents will get better and better at understanding large-scale systems, so a lot of the documentation writing can be done with genAI tools.

Ok, that was a lot! 😅 For almost everyone, the clearly better career choice is software engineering. The main benefit of tech writing is that you'll likely have a better work/life balance (no SEVs for broken docs!).

On the broader topic of choosing software engineering as a field, I also highly recommend this lovely question where I left a detailed response: How do you know if software engineering is the right career for you?

ps. I hope this is your first of many questions!