In my last job they were
In my last job at a support desk, technical writers were highly valued because they would set up our troubleshooting knowledgebase for the team to use. Since we supported a government agency, there was a crazy mix of VERY old software that was put together by their own programmers years ago - think some old DOS-based and old mainframe programs. Problem was, we were contractors and they wouldn't give us the specs on how many of those programs worked, so the technical writers would glean as much information as possible from the agency's support structure (very unkempt structure) and from us support folks.