My name is Gordon McLean, I am a Technical Communicator* and I am proud to be a jack of all trades.
I recall once being asked to breakdown all the skills required to be a Technical Writer, and then to provide a list of daily work tasks. The list of skills was to be used as part of a skills/training matrix, and the work tasks were to be mapped to a timesheet system.
At first I concentrated solely on the Technical Writers role, but even then you need to wear a number of hats; researcher, analyst, information architect, publisher, indexer, illustrator, proof-reader, editor… ohh and writer. All of those are unique job roles in some places yet, as a Technical Writer, you need to be able to successfully take on those roles to some degree. In most software companies a large part of the job is learning the new features, and as you have access to early builds, you are frequently also playing the part of ad-hoc tester. Admittedly you are usually only testing one scenario, and that scenario is the happy path that will be documented, but a bug is a bug and that means being able to identify one, discuss it with a tester or developer, or both, and why not log it as well?
If you are documenting an API or developer toolkit then, in those instances, you frequently don the cap of novice developer, asking the questions you expect them to ask, before switching caps to presume the role of an experienced developer and wondering if the information you are providing is too simple for them to use or if, perhaps, the structure of the information needs altered.
You need to be able to talk to developers and so you need to know a little about whichever code language they are working with, that way when they mention methods, you can ask whether they mean static or instance.
None of these skills/roles are the core part of a Technical Writers job, but simply additional strings to your bow. The more you know about everything, the more value you can add, so long as you don’t let that detract from your core responsibility, to provide documentation. However, the more you know about everything, the better that documentation will be and the higher your value will soar.
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Prompted by The Top 5 Reasons to be a Jack of all Trades