@Haleth, I don’t know how things are in other areas, but I live in Silicon Valley. I wouldn’t advise someone to go into this field now, whereas ten years ago I would have said go for it.
In my decade as a technical editor at one of the big names in high-tech, I saw tech writing go from the product of close-knit on-site teams to barely competent offshore groups (not teams—no collective history or cohesion as a working entity) of new hires, people with no product knowledge, no technical writing background, and in many cases inadequate English skills. The move was supposed to save money on the writing side, but it put a huge burden on the editing side. I could not persuade my managers to look not at the writers’ comparative pay rates but at the cost per page of a finished document. They had no idea how many times we had to handle one document to make it mediocre at best (never mind the impact on job satisfaction).
What’s more, editors were becoming regarded as superfluous just at the time when they needed us most. Raw, virtually unreadable content was going into customers’ hands to guide their configuration and use of extremely sophisticated networking equipment with the potential to fail catastrophically. “Good enough” became the standard of the day. Ship dates trumped quality to a degree I would not have believed when I walked in.
They solved the problem of the editing “bottleneck” and overhead (“editors don’t actually create anything; writers do”) by getting rid of the editors. I was only too glad to accept an early retirement package. This was six years ago.
My colleagues and former colleagues at other nearby high-tech companies were having similar experiences.
I don’t think anything is going to turn this situation around. Instead, the outsourcing initiative is spreading work to other organizations in different countries abroad as the early groups price themselves out of the running.
If you were already in the field, I wouldn’t necessarily advise you to leave it, but from where I sit I don’t see a lot of promise in it for stateside Americans in the next ten years. Maybe someone who’s currently working in it will tell a different story.