Write the Docs runs an annual salary survey for people working in documentation and related fields. The survey results are made available each year here: https://writethedocs.org/surveys/
The core set of questions undergoes revision each year, to accommodate changing conditions in the industry, feedback from the community, and to resolve issues that come up during data processing.
This project allows community members to propose and discuss improvements to the survey questions and instructions directly.
The survey for the current year is opened for submissions in early September and closed at the end of December. The results are released at the beginning of April of the following year.
To allow time to build and test the survey form, the deadline for finalizing the questions for the 2024 survey is August 16, 2024.
The questions are divided into nine thematic sections, indicated by a letter:
- Employment parameters
- Job changes
- Workplace
- Employee salary, benefits, and satisfaction
- Contractor rates and satisfaction
- Pay transparency
- Organization demographics
- Respondent demographics
- Survey feedback
The text of the questions for each section can be found in the corresponding markdown file in the repository.
When proposing changes, keep the following in mind:
- questions should relate to the core objective of the survey: to help community members determine what an appropriate salary range looks like
- continuity from one year to the next is important, to allow changes over time to be observed - changes to existing questions should not change the context in which the question was previously asked
- the length of the survey is already pushing the limits of good taste, so any significant additions need to be evaluated carefully to make sure they don't negatively impact the survey's completion rate
- use inclusive, gender-neutral, non-biased, unambiguous language - and remember that respondents may be employed, unemployed, contractors or freelancers, in any country or region, and that while "technical writer" is historically the most common role amongst the Write the Docs community, many people working in documentation are not technical writers
- multiple choice (either single answer, or multple answer) questions are favoured over open-ended or text-entry questions, for ease of data processing
There's a number of ways you can contribute:
- raise a new issue to begin a discussion
- comment on an existing issue to add your voice
- propose a change by submitting a pull request
- comment on an existing pull request