Salary Survey, That’s what life is all about

Hello Editors,

I read this issue (July-August) end-to-end and really enjoyed the multi-faceted discussion on such an important topic, namely Salary Survey. With different views, you can see all shades of gray in between, and that's what life is all about. Thanks for collating such an issue and bringing it into a coherent whole for readers.

Regards

Pawan Nayar

Treat Indeed

Hi Editors,

This special issue on Salary Survey is a treat indeed. I specially liked Guru Kamat's article for the broad coverage and cogent arguments.

Thanks

Sankara Rajanala

Excellent Initiative

Hi Editors,

The STC Salary Survey Special issue of Indus is a valuable collection of articles, written by some of the stalwarts in the Technical Communication industry. An excellent initiative by the Indus editors to motivate and guide today's Technical Communicators.

Regards

Sita Chandrakant Bhatt

Sound Analysis 

Hello Editors,

I really enjoyed the July-Aug 2005 issue of Indus focusing on the recent STC India Chapter Salary Survey. The articles that interpret the survey data provide a sound analysis of ground realities. Congratulations everyone!

Regards

Susan Alexander

Amazing Job

Hello Editors,

I thought the Salary Survey was an amazing job. This issue of Indus compliments it very well with some thoughtful and thought provoking articles. For those who think numbers are everything, this issue really puts things in perspective. All articles are well written, and certify
the fact that Technical Communication in India is on the road to maturity.

Regards

Anupama A

Ground Realities

Dear Editors,

I did read the July-Aug salary survey special and the May-June issue. Here are some observations. Overall, the Indus team continues to do a great job in ensuring variety, quality, and consistent presentation. The PDF versions of the Webzine are shaping up very well. They facilitate easy offline reading. Here are a couple of suggestions for improving them. For readers who prefer reading the PDFs on-screen, it would help to have bookmarks/links, which readers can click to navigate to specific articles/columns. In the PDF version of the salary survey special issue, many pages (example: 14, 15, & 16) have photos that are irrelevant to the actual content and therefore unnecessary distractions. Please consider avoiding such photos.

In the May-June issue, the web pages containing articles written by Anupama and Yamini have empty spaces at the end, due to which, the articles *seem* longer than they are (judging by the vertical scroll bar). Readers who dislike reading long articles may be put off.
In the theme article for the May-June issue too, the table text is not formatted correctly.

In general, I think the articles are getting longer and longer. While this increase may be justified in some cases, I think the goal should be to keep articles to within, say, a 1000 words. Too many lengthy articles may be waste of your team's effort because not many readers would have the patience or motivation to scroll through them.

Thanks

Kumar Dhanagopal

Excellent Article on IA

Dear Editors,

Refer to the article by Anupama Gummaraju in the May-June issue. This is an excellent introduction to Information Architecture (IA). One challenge, as I see, in IA is in meeting the comprehension of people from different disciplines, and hence, different requirements. I have given one example of this problem in an article on tech communication in power systems, published in Indus (March 03). See http://www.stc-india.org/indus/032003/uchaudhuri.htm.

Regards

Udit Chaudhuri

Best Practices: Comparing Notes

Hi Editors,

The May-June issue made for some different type of reading. The variety was there for readers to savor. The regular columns were good material, as always. The grammar dose was a good refresher for the newbies and oldies alike...

I read the Best Practices article to compare notes. I realized that quite a few documentation departments in India have indeed internalized a good number of the recommendations that the writer has made. BP# 3, 4, 5, and the bonus tips stood out—more of us should open our eyes to these. Sadly though, one noted from BP#5 that writers are vaguely placed in org charts world over! It might help if we did some soul searching to find out why, and what is it that we are doing wrong to get ignored or sidelined. I can see that this has lead to a lot of dispiritedness in one writer too many.

With respect to BP#1, I wonder how a 'near utopia' can be created for software writers in exclusivity—in the real world, writers' complaints, as listed in the article, will auto-erase if a professional, if not healthy, environment is set for the programmers—the meaty role players in the software development drama. In my own experience, I have come across thousands of occasions where developers endlessly complain that they have no specifications to follow or that the specifications are never frozen. They have to work in perpetual worry of change... I have muted my complaint, thanks to one such live experience :-).

The personality profile made an interesting reading. Good issue on the whole.

Keep the good work going!

Jaya Parameswaran