CS as the only path to programming was always too narrow, and often people with a broader education are better at creative solutions. With AI-assisted programming I'd argue they have an even clearer advantage now.
That is completely untrue. Efficient, creative writing is a skill that can be learned by anyone by following a handful of rules.
Which is why the statement you are responding to is often more true than you might realize. Because these people have had a lot more practice in that specific area. Although not all of them, that would be a generalization in itself.
We get editors all the time talking about things they commonly see done badly in submissions.
Slush pile readers (the people reading unsolicited submitted manuscripts) have so many war stories about awful writing.
The books you see on the shelves are less than 1% of what's created and even then there are ones that get through that are bad.
Now we have amazon inundated with AI generated books that are just incoherent.
And that is creative writing that strives only to be entertaining. Tech writing tries to teach you how to do something, which is much harder.
I like watching maker videos, and even the ones trying to explain how they are doing something always skip over important steps.
I’d even go so far as to argue that if someone has poor writing skills in their native language, they’re probably not a very good programmer.
If you're a decent tech writer who can write well, grok engineer speak, collaborate well with engineers during crunch time before a release, and apply your technical knowledge to build and maintain documentation infrastructure... well, you'll get comped slightly beneath the level of a developer with similar experience.
For folks like me who enjoy the writing side of things, it's worth it. But there are very few people who truly appreciate both the writing and the development side of the role. You honestly need both.
Most companies pay poorly, and wind up hiring non-technical folks who can barely manage a CMS. Those people can be helpful in a larger org, but at the end of the day, most technical orgs need a truly technical writer who can talk with the engineers directly and mess around with the product pre-release.
In fact, many fields actually require their technical writers to have some amount of education in the field (e.g. biology BAs minimum or such for medical technical writing).
Unfortunately, this is a braid field in which other technical writers are performing really basic tasks, like writing straightforward gui instructions. I think this wide range gives the market an excuse to undervalue the discipline, while many writers doing important conceptual writing work are some of the most valuable participants in the arena. After all, nearly all of human epistemic and technological development has been conveyed through the medium of text. What are mathematicians if not amazing technical communicators?