Usable Help - The care and feeding of engineers

Ben Kaufmann, writing What Your Tech Writers Should Know about Working with Engineers, offers several key productivity tips. It's generally up to the tech writer to effectively manage their relationship with engineers and other subject matter experts, so its worth reading the piece to see what you can glean from it. For example, when starting a project with an engineer with whom you've never worked, taking a minute to explain that the documentation does not describe how the product works, but what you can do with the product, will save you hours of time over the course of the project.

There's a good dose of humor in the article too, such as this pithy observation:

Our brains are all wired differently, and we must work with others accordingly. Or, to paraphrase an old saw: To the optimistic writer, the glass is half full; to the pessimistic writer, the glass is half empty; to the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.