Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we hear from other writers to explore writing concepts and strategies, deepen our tech writing skills, get inspired, and connect with our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. If you’re passionate about documentation, you belong here, no matter your job title or experience level. Welcome!

Kate Mueller: [00:00:28] Hello, lovely not-boring tech writers. I’m Kate Mueller and this is one of our solo episodes where I share things I’m thinking about or working on. I’m recording this episode at the end of October, as the political ads here in Maine have reached a fever pitch, and our past-peak leaves are more on the ground than in the trees. I’m also participating in a time-honored New England tradition, stubbornly holding out and turning my heat on until November. I’m just wearing lots and lots of layers.

Kate Mueller: [00:00:58] First, my progress update. Since my last solo episode, I’ve continued to chip away at the article editor docs updates. I edited another dozen or so articles for the new article editor layout, which isn’t a lot, but it is still progress. Instead, I spent a lot of this month working on other projects. I prepared for and delivered a webinar session on optimizing search in KnowledgeOwl. That one ended up being more complicated than I thought, since we rolled out semantic search last year, and I ended up doing a deep dive to understand how semantic search combines with keyword search, both so that I could explain it in the webinar and so I could try to figure out how to update our search documentation. I did a first pass at updating those docs, but they’re still not nearly as clear and concise as I’d like them to be. Honestly, I have never loved working on the search documentation, so the webinar was at least a really good forcing function to get me back in there, but I still feel like they could be better. At this point, I honestly wonder if it would be easier if I just tried to write them from scratch, instead of trying to tweak and adjust the existing documentation. We’ll see where I end up on that one.

Kate Mueller: [00:02:10] I also finally tackled the Microsoft Teams app documentation and the App Store submission support materials. The big piece of this was working with Erica to craft a reasonable script for the explainer video, which I then recorded narration and video for and edited. The perk of doing these solo podcast episodes every month is that the audio narration piece was the easiest for me to do. I did it in two takes. It took me like five minutes. So look at me building useful cross-domain skills by having these conversations with you every month. And Sue just told me that we’ve submitted the Teams app to the App Store, so hopefully this is a fast and relatively painless approval process. That project has been hanging over me for months. I think I’ve mentioned it in at least two previous solo episodes, and so it felt really good to get that explainer video done and the screenshots done and to check all those tasks off. Historically, I’ve done a lot of these App Store submissions, and moving forward, Erica will be taking the lead on them and just bringing me in to do docs or video recordings or whatever, and I’m really excited to not be the owner of these tasks moving forward and to just contribute the bits that I’m really good at.

Kate Mueller: [00:03:24] And let’s see. Currently, I’m in the midst of finishing prepping for a webinar on authentication options in KnowledgeOwl, which I think is going to be a lot like the search webinar: it’s forcing me to reexamine corners of the documentation that I actually don’t do a lot with, and to update them. I don’t think I’ll have time to get the documentation exactly where I want it before the webinar, but hopefully I can create a coherent punchdown list for that. And yeah, I feel like my work life is just juggling never-ending punchdown lists right now. So shout out to you if that’s also your reality. But in thinking about where I’ve been and where I’m going, it really does feel so good to get the Microsoft Teams work done.

Kate Mueller: [00:04:07] And my hope is that since I don’t have any other really big projects other than the webinars on my plate in the next month, I’m hoping I can make a serious dent in my remaining article editor updates. I think I have about 33 articles left for the full punchdown, and maybe another, I don’t know, two dozen that I’ll need to update since my initial round of updates, because we changed other elements of the UI, so like 50 to 60. I don’t think I’ll get all of that done before the next solo episode, but I’m hoping I can get the total under 25, so we’ll see how that goes.

Kate Mueller: [00:04:42] Of course, I’ve also been reflecting on my interview with Sharon Burton. There is so much in that interview and I was struck by a few different things. So let me see if I can make sense of my thoughts here. First off, I can’t reflect on this episode without reflecting on Sharon’s book, Women in Technical Communication. Exploring the book and the contributors in it made me achingly aware of just how much I don’t know a lot of the names in our field historically. My own knowledge is dominated by work from the last probably decade or so, and my historical references are pretty slim. The conversation really made me want to dig into some of the older books and writers that Sharon mentioned, since they often still have useful insights that have aged well. So we’re just going to add those to my never-ending to-be-read list.

Kate Mueller: [00:05:32] And both during my conversation with Sharon and listening to the final edit, I was struck by how deeply passionate she is about capturing these stories before they disappear. It’s an angle of tech writing that I’ve never given much thought to. I just show up, I do my job. I go do other things. I don’t think about how my story might be contributing to an understanding of the field, or one day that it might be historically relevant. I dare say most of us haven’t. And were it not for Sharon, I’m not sure we would be now. But the passion she has for collecting these stories, and her palpable sadness in not being able to include Char’s story before her death, all of that really elevates this project to a different level than most business books, in my opinion. And I’m still kind of working my way through reading the book, and I’m really happy that Sharon’s continuing in her quest with a broader book on women in tech, because she’s right, once these stories are gone, they’re gone.

Kate Mueller: [00:06:32] And then there’s Sharon herself. Like so many of us, Sharon sort of fell into doing this work and has been doing it now for over 30 years. She began in the age of mainframes and is still going strong in the age of AI, which is just wild to think about. She’s been teaching for decades, she’s written books herself, she has quietly become one of the writers who other writers may look at and think, “I want to be like her when I grow up,” just as she mentioned feeling about writers she referenced. That’s a full life and an accomplished career. I love that after decades in this field, she’s still centering the idea of curiosity being absolutely integral to the job. She said at one point that she’d learned she could teach almost anyone to be a passable writer, but what she couldn’t teach was the curiosity, that drive to ask the question, “What if I?” And at a time when I sometimes wonder if I’m getting burnt out doing this job, this insight meant a lot to me because I realized, I do still ask this question a lot. Pretty much every day that I’m at work. I still love poking at a thing and potentially breaking it. I still love seeing what happens if I do something in a way that it wasn’t explicitly designed to be done. And there is something really comforting about talking with someone whose career has been notably longer than yours, who says that that trait is the most important thing.

Kate Mueller: [00:08:06] This episode is sponsored by KnowledgeOwl, your team’s next knowledge base solution. You don’t have to be a technical wizard to use KnowledgeOwl. Our intuitive, robust features empower teammates of all feathers to spend more time on content and less time on administration. Learn more and sign up for a free 30-day trial at knowledgeowl.com.

Kate Mueller: [00:08:28] My conversation with Sharon has also had some weird synchronicity with something else I’ve been thinking about lately. I’m not sure it’s fully formed in my head, but I’m gonna do my best here. So I’ll say the root of this idea came from a conversation I had with a former coworker. He’s a senior software engineer, and the company he’s currently working for has committed pretty strongly to using AI. And he was telling me about what his day looked like now, and that it largely seems to be consumed by either telling AI to do various things and testing and reviewing work that either he or other people have done using AI. And he pointed out to me that this meant that they were shipping a lot of things much faster than in the past. But then he said something like, “But my whole day is largely taken up with testing and review, which are my two least favorite things about my job.” And that observation stuck with me, in part because this guy is somebody who has always doggedly solved problems. I loved working with him because he would get there eventually, no matter how sticky and uncomfortable the thing was, and that tenacity was something I continue to admire and respect, and it feels weird to me that he’s in a position where that trait doesn’t come into play at all.

Kate Mueller: [00:09:59] And elsewhere, I’ve seen comics and comments about how people are no longer doing a lot of the work they most enjoy, but instead managing and overseeing AI agents or skills who are doing that work. This is one of the ways that I feel very grateful for my current role and environment. Although I do have coworkers who are definitely all in on AI and managing agents and processes, doing all kinds of things, no one has forced me into that space. I’ve been able to kind of tiptoe into the bits of it that I think are useful, without having to go whole bore. And a big piece of Sharon and I’s conversation, really the second half of the episode, is talking about the benefits she found in using AI to vibe code and automate the things that she didn’t enjoy doing, so that she could spend more time on the stuff that she does. And increasingly, I seem to know more and more people who aren’t able to do this, who are instead just automating everything and really are becoming managers of AI. And personally, I believe the best use case for AI and vibe coding remains the idea of automating or tackling the things you don’t want to do, so that you have more time to do the stuff you enjoy. It’s why I refuse to outsource writing actual content to AI, because that is the piece I enjoy. It’s why this podcast will continue to be voiced by me as an actual human, rather than an AI host. God, I shudder to think about that one.

Kate Mueller: [00:11:36] And you know, the thing is, we aren’t all cut out to be managers. I have no desire to be a manager. I’ve tried it in very limited ways over my career with humans, and it doesn’t work for me. It sucks the life out of me. I don’t think I’m especially good at it. I can kind of do it for like a few months or a year, and then I hit a point where I really start to struggle. I like supporting other people, but at my core, I don’t enjoy overseeing work being done. I love actually doing the work, except for, you know, those really tedious, horrible tasks that are part of my job and then that’s something I try to automate away so that I can do the work that I enjoy. But my own work history has shown me time and time again that I’m really cut out to be a high-level individual contributor and not a manager. And I especially don’t want to be a manager of robots. I don’t want a small army of AI skills or agents doing all the work I normally do. I just want some specific, nicely scoped, purpose-built tools to automate the stuff I dislike or that eats up way too much time. And I want to keep manually doing the stuff that I believe I’m good at and that brings me some sense of satisfaction or contribution, and that is useful to the organization. I like work. I mean, I like working. And I often feel like this makes me a minority in the tech world, especially right now. And maybe I’m wholeheartedly a Luddite in this way. But I do think there’s a certain joy and pride in doing work and doing it well, and that is the last thing that I want to offload to AI. To me, that just sucks all the fun out of doing work. And it becomes just work rather than a thing that I also take pride in doing and problems that I enjoy solving.

Kate Mueller: [00:13:35] It took me a long time to admit that I didn’t want to be a manager. My work history is littered with cases where I signed up as an individual contributor, and then I performed so well that I ended up in something like a manager role or a manager-adjacent role, you know, project management, product management, all kinds of stuff. And ultimately in those roles, I got unhappy and I either left or I requested to go back to being more of an individual contributor. So the long story short here is that I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work for me. And at 44, that’s some hard-earned self-knowledge, but it’s self-knowledge I know deep down in my core. I am not a manager. And so I will resist this trend toward managing AI as long as I possibly can. Perhaps I’m turning at windmills. Maybe eventually it’ll mean that I don’t even work in the tech industry at all anymore, because nobody will want that. I don’t know, it’s hard to say where this trajectory goes, but in the meantime, I’m still trying to take pride in the work that I do. I’m still curious. I like learning how things work and asking questions. I still do get a certain thrill out of breaking things so our developers can fix them or make them more intuitive. And I really love finding an effective way to explain a really complicated thing so that people will get it. Eventually, I will figure out how to explain semantic and keyword search as a combination, and I’m going to feel so proud of that.

Kate Mueller: [00:15:07] Sharon mentioned that reviewing all the stories from women in the book really drove home to her how much tech is about change and how much our field is about change. And some of the women in the book began in tech writing before the personal computer existed. They weathered the shift to PCs, the advent of the internet, the dot-com boom, and in some cases now are still working and handling AI. A lot of those changes felt like they maybe were going to destroy our field, but instead they just changed it. And Sharon, with all that perspective, said that she felt like the basics of our field won’t change. That clear communication and clear writing will always be needed, though how we deliver it may change, or the value add that we bring may change. That’s a lot more optimistic than I often feel. And for that historical perspective, I really appreciated our conversation.

Kate Mueller: [00:16:00] I’m still reserving judgment on how AI truly changes our field. I’m holding out hope that the fact that AI agents and tools need good documentation will help keep some of the things I love most about my job as actual parts of my job, and that the core of the field, that emphasis on clear communication and writing, that that will remain unchanged, and just the ways we do a lot of this stuff changes. Maybe the processes, the tooling, whatever. I would like to think that in 10 or 20 years, tech writers will still need to be humans with deep curiosity and a healthy dose of empathy. And maybe we’ll also need to be efficient robot managers, but I’m still spending a chunk of the day getting to break things and ask a million questions. And as long as I get to do that and mutter to myself over rough drafts, I will still count it as a net win.

Kate Mueller: [00:16:55] So this month, I’d love to give you a huge aspirational thing. But the truth is I’m trying to balance doing what is more customer education and instructional design in these webinars and then feeding that work back into the documentation I’m doing to make it better, to simplify it, to deploy some of the same mechanisms I’m using in these webinars to explain things back into the docs. Because some of these docs I wrote years ago, and they’ve remained somewhat verbose, and I don’t think anyone is being well-served by them at this point. And so I’m just trying to figure out what that feedback loop looks like. Trying to keep all of my spinning plates in the air, as it were, and hoping that what I’m producing at the end of that is good and useful and helping people either use our product or solve the problems that they want to solve.

Kate Mueller: [00:17:55] As always, if you have ideas for topics or guests, if there’s a bit of the tech writing world that your life would be improved by hearing an episode on, or if you’d just like to tell us what you’re getting out of the show, please message us on LinkedIn or Bluesky @thenotboringtechwriter, or email tnbtw@knowledgeowl.com. You can also hit up thenotboringtechwriter.com and select Suggest a guest to recommend yourself or someone else as a new guest.

Kate Mueller: [00:18:28] The Not-Boring Tech Writer is co-produced by our podcast Head of Operations, Chad Timblin, and me. Post-production is handled by the lovely humans at Astronomic Audio with editing by Dillon, transcription by Madi, and general post-production support by Been and Alex. Our theme song is by Brightside Studio. Our artwork is by Bill Netherlands. You can order The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts, stickers, mugs, and other merch from the Merch tab on thenotboringtechwriter.com. You can check out KnowledgeOwl’s products at knowledgeowl.com. And if you want to work with me on docs, knowledge management coaching, or revamping an existing knowledge base, go to knowledgewithsass.com. Until next time, I’m Kate Mueller, and you are the not-boring tech writer.