Technical writers worth their salt are few and far between.
Could you please expand on this one? Do you mean people who write help guides for OS/APIs, or do people who write industry reports or is it something different? Also, do you have any examples of such people/jobs?
This is something that is very interesting to me but I have no idea where to start.
We produce about one report per week, < 20 pages for venture capital groups about to invest into some company. That's a pretty tricky combination of elements, you are writing for a non-technical audience about technical findings.
The companies we work for tend to have people on the business side that have certain ideas about requirements which then need to be translated into technical specifications, typically so that some outsourcing company can make soup of it.
In both cases mistakes can be quite costly. There is this thread right now about 'what HN has given you', and if there is one thing HN has given me it is that it has made me a better writer (that, and blogging), which turned out to be a super useful skill.
Another option your comment suggests would be something in popular science or media.