# 024: How To Ask for Career Help (without getting ignored) + Systems Thinking Tips
¡Hola, Tech Writing Friends!
📬 Quick Life Update
I had to pause this newsletter after April 28 while I relocated to Europe (holaaa from Barcelona 🇪🇸).
It hasn’t been a vacation.
It’s been a tsunami of goodbyes, boxes, legal documents coming out of my ears, and moments of doubt.
Leaving behind my entire life in Mexico and the U.S.—everything familiar, everything I built— to start over in a new country.
And to be honest with you, I fully expected a substantial dip in subscribers during this break.
Instead? ✨ I gained 10 new subscribers! ✨
Feeling extra grateful. Thanks for sticking around and for your warm welcome back!
💰Today’s 6-Figure Tech Writer Tip: Systems Thinking
Every day, I get LinkedIn connection requests from folks in engineering, DevRel, and technical writing.
Some are from bots congratulating me on my “latest round of funding.” (Newsflash: I don’t run a startup. Never raised a single cent in funding. Please fix your AI workflows, folks.)
The messages that hit me hardest come from the up-and-comers (interns, juniors, career switchers) reaching out with hope.
The irony? They write long, winding messages… without actually asking anything. It sums up to:
“I’d love your advice to grow my career.”
And while I totally get the sentiment (we all need mentors!) I want to offer a little tough love here:
👉🏽 Vague requests don’t inspire action. Specificity opens doors.
That’s not because people don’t want to help. It’s because they don’t know how to help.
So when someone reached out last week with one of these “open-ended help me” messages, I replied:
“My first piece of advice is that when you reach out to someone you don’t know, you frame your request in a way that makes it likely for them to feel invested in responding to you and giving you their time. 🫶🏽 Ask me a specific question.”
She thanked me profusely and followed up with a real question:
“For someone transitioning into roles where tech and business intersect, what is one skill or habit you think is most valuable to highlight when applying?”
My answer: Systems Thinking.
It’s the #1 skill that elevates you above other technical candidates.
Here’s why and what it looks like in practice…
Let’s say your company has multiple product lines.
Most writers would just write documentation product by product.
But a systems thinker? They design for scale.
They create:
Shared information architectures
Reusable content components
A context model that maps across customer journeys
Taxonomies that work across the whole platform
Seamless cross-navigation and onboarding across multiple product lines
It’s about seeing the whole system and how contextual content flows through it.
You’re not “just” a writer.
You’re an information architect.
An ecosystem strategist.
An information systems designer.
You research your company’s ideal customer persona (ICP).
You design information flows that reduce friction and increase conversion.
You support growth and retention.
🔥🔥🔥 You bring in revenue. 🔥🔥🔥
That’s what 6-Figure Tech Writers do.
Psst! If you want access to a curated list of remote DevRel and Tech Writing jobs (plus extra tips I don’t share on the site!) subscribe to the newsletter here.
Hasta luego,
Quetzalli
