Dispelling the development myth: technical communicators are not second class citizens!

There is a nagging feeling in the pit of many a professional communicator's stomach that, in the eyes of the development community (that is, the engineers, programmers, developers, the movers and shakers of our information age, the ones who are given the "real work" to do), technical communicators are looked down upon, thought of as "expendable," unnecessary "overhead," the headcount that doesn't really count in the grand and noble quest to deliver the latest technological marvel to the masses. When even their own management team casts an ominous eye in their direction every time the notion of budget cuts and subsequent layoffs loom large, the writing community could easily be justified for having a sense of paranoia that their perceived value-add to the development effort of new products is significantly less than that of their code-crunching counterparts in the next aisle. This work attempts to dispel some of that angst by sharing one technical communicator's experience in facing self doubt head-on, in diving into the deep end of the developer pool early in the project cycle, finding ways to contribute to the design and development effort, and to provide real value as an active member of the project team. As a result, a strong and mutually respectful relationship between technical communicators and programmers has been established, with programmers learning to seek out the technical communicator's advice on GUI design and usability, message formats and standard usage of terminology, and actually listening to (and in many cases implementing!) suggested ideas from their dedicated writing team.