minnca

This is how you lose the time war is unlike any other book I've read! I thought it was super disorienting – and I loved that.

Ken Liu has some excellent short stories. His collection The Paper Menagerie from a few years ago was particularly great. (The titular short story won a Hugo.) He also translated the first and third books in the Three-Body Problem series.

Ted Chiang is another great SF short story writer.

Definitely Maybe by the Strugatsky brother is excellent – though it was published in the 70s so maybe not "modern."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel)

I think The Beginning Place is an underrated Le Guin book that didn't make the list! It's definitely not science fiction or even futuristic – more like fantasy plus magical realism – but I found the plot so unique and engaging.

I'm a big Le Guin fan and I consider her books to be sort of like "anthropological science fiction," as in they're focused on the societies and people of science fictional societies and less so on the science behind those societies.

Google has some pretty good introductory writing resources for developers: https://developers.google.com/tech-writing/one

That being said, Microsoft and Google have decent, publicly-available tech writing style guides: -Microsoft: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/acronyms -Google: https://developers.google.com/style

I've also found that it's more useful to use a good doc as an outline for your own documentation than to start from scratch + style guide. Using a good doc as a guide can help you develop your own documentation style – you can figure out what works and doesn't work for you.

Style guides can be great in the right context, but I think focusing on them too much can take away from the most important part of documentation – the content.

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

I'd say a first step is to start building a body of writing samples. You can do this in a lot of different ways, but two suggestions are 1. adding or improving documentation for an open source project and 2. writing technical blog posts/articles/how-tos on topics that interest you and posting them on a personal website. Starting to build this body of work can also help you discern whether you even like technical writing. Then, I'd say the next step is to just start applying to technical writing jobs. (Maybe contract ones, if you'd like to just try it out first.) Since you have coding experience, I'd suggest targeting tech writing jobs that require proficiency with languages you're familiar with or deal with technologies in domains you're interested/have experience in.

Have you ever considered technical writing? If you're a good writer with CS/engineering, you'd have a definite leg up over other applicants (even if you don't have direct tech writing experience). I'm a tech writer (English + CS background) and I love my job. I know quite a few tech writers who dabble in docs-related automation/process improvement projects.

Not sure about MOST thought-provoking, but "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" and "State Change" (both by Ken Liu) are two good ones I read recently and think a lot about.

Your former employer is giving out your contact information so you can help them recruit(?)

I think a lot of women would view a request like this as helping other women, rather than helping the company. Plus, as Nabors points out, the company would presumably ask the ex-employee permission before giving out contact info.

"that is a {guy|lady} that I work with."

"Person" also works in this case. +1 for they. "Lady" seems patronizing to me - would you call someone a "gentleman"? To me, "lady" describes a woman who is "traditionally feminine" – I get that when people use "lady" today they don't typically mean "traditionally feminine," but "lady" is still evocative of a time when women were seen as delicate/demure/less than men.

I should have clarified – it's a pet peeve for me when men do this exclusively for women/not for other men. It's definitely something I think it can be pretty observable during an onsite – for example, if you're waiting in a lobby or go to lunch as part of an interview, you can watch how men and women interact around a door. I've a man hold open a door for the sole woman in his group, and then walk through the door after her and not hold the door for the remaining guys in the group. Not trying to be super granular here – just for me, it's something I watch for. It's also an additive thing – if the door thing's just a one-off deal, it's probably not indicative of anything. If, however, it's paired with some patronizing language and other vaguely sexist things, it might actually mean something.

Interview vibes matter. As a woman, if the men (it's usually men) that interview me talk down to me or use patronizing language (however subtle), that's a red flag, though not necessarily a deal-breaker. Also, it's a personal pet peeve of mine if men constantly hold the door/say "after you" and let me walk through the door first. That's a sign that they treat women as "ladies" (just fyi to men, pls don't call the women you work with "ladies") not colleagues. You can usually pick up on this (the door thing) in an interview, in my experience.

Ummm what about just going outside of the house to work? Like one of those shared workspaces? Not being able to work when your wife is around doesn't really seem to me like ground for divorce, it just seems like you need different kinds of workspaces.

In my 1:1's, I talk about what I'm working on, any challenges I'm facing, and what I want to work on in the future (some combination of those three). You might be able to talk about the issues you mentioned if you can frame them as directly impacting your day-to-day work.

I write developer docs (internal).

I also probably don't fit your target audience, but I'm an entry level FAANG technical writer. I make ~105k (salary + bonus + stock). My more experienced coworkers make much more than that – in my experience, tech writers definitely don't cap out at 70k (far from it!).