Fortune published "100 Best Companies to Work For"

[yesthattom]

Google is #1. This is the first year they qualify to be on the list, so starting out at #1 is pretty cool.

In a related note, I really do like working here. ...and I’m hiring... ...in NY, Zurich, and Mountain View...

Comments

[redsonja.livejournal.com]

It's funny that you say that, I've found the opposite to be true. I feel that O'Reilly's success as a publisher is rooted in the accessibility of their books. I've even heard them sneered at (admittedly by a not very nice guy) as being "written for noobs". I don't consider that to be an insult, especially considering that it came from someone who failed the Solaris certification test that I passed because I bothered to read the training guide that he felt was too "beneath" him.

My own opinion is that a lot of the people who write for O'Reilly are considered industry leaders not only because they understand the technology in detail, but because they also know how to explain it in an accessible manner to people who've never seen it before.

Private company technical writing can vary wildly in comparison. You can get a lot of excruciating technical specifics that need to stay company internal, or they'll striate versions of the data based on support contract level (or in the military, security classification). The lifespan of a document can be very short. Of course, that's job security right there, but it seems to me that a product and it's documentation should be robust enough to last for a while. Once you're on the inside you're documenting bugs, patches, version upgrades and spec changes galore. I worked at Sun for four years, and geez o pete but those people went through the dead trees (or digital equivalent) when it came to documentation.

I guess it's all about what you want to write. I can't see myself as a technical writer, dude, especially the company internal kind, so more power to ya. I'd probably get pissed off at having to constantly twiddle a document to fit a product, to the point where I'd just want to fix the product to fit the document instead. :D

Nice that you covered the Asia Society. I was there recently. They've added an audio presentation that you can access via cel phone as you walk around the exhibits.

[n5red.livejournal.com]

I find the O'Reilly books to be extremely accessable. In particular, I can highly recommend "Time Management for Syatem Administrators", I keep loaning it out to coworkers.

[redsonja.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I asked some questions about it on Tom's web site, but it was in reply to an older post and perhaps was not seen, so perhaps I can ask again here: are either adult ADD/ADHD and/or the "caffeine geek subculture" addressed therein?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I replied. Sadly the system doesn't email you if someone replies to your reply. (and the CSS is screwed up right now on the comment pages... dang!)

I'm going to turn my answer into a full post next week.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

They give it back?

People should steal it, and threaten to beat you up if you ask for it back.

You should buy dozens of copies and hand them out rather than risk daggers and funny looks when you ask for it back.

(Wow, I gotta cut down on the caffeine and askaninja.com videos)

[n5red.livejournal.com]

Well, perhaps if I had more stable employment, particularly in some area where your book hasn't gotten as good a distribution. Like, say for example, Zurich.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the comments. I'm not really going for pure technical writing: I'll take it if it's in my field of expertise, but I'd rather work on things that are more mainstream. O.K., so an IEEE journal isn't exactly "mainstream", but people *do* read them for entertainment as well as work. :)

The tabletop article was fun to do.