The whole thing gets even more confusing when you consider how poorly written and non-descriptive most job descriptions are. I used to be a recruiter and the main part of the job was asking companies to explain their job descriptions.

Can one person be told to do it all? Personally, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I tend to come at this issue from a different direction. As one of the concluding slides in my “Why Technical Writers Shouldn’t Be Writers” presentation, I have the following list of things I believe we all should be:

– User Advocates
– Directors
– Designers
– Futurists / Technologists
– Story Tellers
– and above all Communicators.

I think that the different job titles that get applied to different aspects of what we do are just a reflection of where a particular person’s focus is at that point in their career. But to be effective in any of those positions, you need to understand and appreciate the whole process.

The “Document Architect” comes close to the “Documentation Manager” role, the two titles may refer to the same job.

I’ve rarely seen “Template Designer” as a role, much less a position. Instead, “template design” seems to be a task engaged in once in a blue moon – until “the old templates” have become completely unusable… That task frequently goes to the tool guru, whose usually a writer.

I don’t know anyone who’s only editing, but not writing. I find it instructive and constructive when writers edit each other’s work, but takes a good team culture and mutual respect. Since editing frequently gets very little attention, I try to promote two separations as a minimum standard:
- Separate editing (a writer/editor improving writing, grammar, layout, etc.) from reviewing (a SME checking contents).
- Separate editor and writer – don’t let anyone talk you into seriously editing your own stuff.

To go all out on editing, check out the nine types of edits in the five “Levels of Edit” by Robert van Buren and Mary Fran Buehler, available as PDF at http://www.iit.edu/~mackiewicz/levels_of_edit.pdf.

I agree that an “experienced person could handle all these roles” – but I would still argue that no person “should be told to handle all these roles”. If you grow into them or if you choose to develop that way, that’s fine. But as posed, the question just sounds quite uncomfortable… I know I wouldn’t want to be the person asking it – and much less answering it.