> But a different question is, why is no company trying to do this differently?

I once worked at a company - in a different domain - that made a conscious decision to make this kind of hire. It worked incredibly well, and I never understood why more companies didn't do it.

The context in my case was the Australian offices of a management consulting firm (BCG). The Melbourne and Sydney offices hired what were called "editors", brought on at the same grade as the consultants. Not editing as in correcting grammar. But helping the consultants improve the logic of the arguments in their slide decks: so they were logically consistent, easy to understand, and actually addressed the clients' issues. I was a junior consultant back then, and we were constantly pushed by our managers "have you seen Yvonne?" [the Melbourne editor] when preparing for major presentations.

I would love that job, I'm always going back to presentations and finding better ways they could have made the point and identifying missing context what they would need to be more relevant.

A previous team I was on ended up with this role. Strong writer with no technical skills joined the team and worked hand-in-hand with engineers fleshing out docs. It was productive for the engineers because they needed to articulate the ideas very clearly. The writer has been attached to that project now for 6-7 years at this point, and could probably stand in as a support engineer for some problems. It was a little painful getting HR to approve a tech writer getting paid close to an engineer position (this was after a few years).

I do like the sibling comment calling for a librarian. I imagine that would pay a ton of dividends if the librarian was motivated and got support.

Some companies do value technical writers and pay them as much as engineers, but they are still pretty rare.

There are three things that I think are preventing technical writing from being more widely valued:

1. Software companies tend not to distinguish between technical writers who are good at English vs. technical writers who are good at engineering, understand their audience, and can articulate complex ideas to that audience effectively.

2. Technical writers who are good at English make about half as much as technical writers with engineering skills, but they also muddy the hiring waters and drag salaries down for everyone else.

3. Most corporate-people think because they can type up a decent email they can write technical documentation themselves. They're usually wrong on both counts.

As a tech writer, I think this is because it's hard to concretely quantify the value that a tech writer brings, and thus it's hard to make a clear business case for.

> differently? Like, hiring one good tech writer to maintain the company documentation

He assumes that "full understanding (into every detail) of what is being documented is needed" (as I put it). So, the new hire will never get it right 100%. he will both struggle and annoy others (to forever enlighten him), which is a fair point.

But it is not black or white. Others here have more positive experiences

Probably not the same pay as developers but the scenario you describe is already true in most regulated industries, where some regulated body actually asks for the docs on any given product.