Comment by toast0
21 hours ago
I'm not good at writing documentation, and you can't pay me enough to care about it, sorry. I've tried enough times, and nobody reads it, or it becomes out of date by the time anyone reads it, and I don't see the personal ROI. I'll write notes for future me, and put them somewhere others can read it, if you don't make that onerous. Otherwise, if you want documentation from me, you need to have someone else drag the information out of me and write it down. But, I've only rarely been in organizations that care enough about documentation to do that, so there you go.
There's always a lot of talk about how documentation is important, but there's never budget for a tech writer (well, you must have found some, as you've taken tech writer as a title, but it's not often available) or a documentation maintainer.
Writing / English were my worst subjects in school. Yet I have written internal, dealer, and customer facing documentation because I was the only one knowledgeable on the subject and there was no tech writer.
Now I work where there is a tech writer and still create internal, dealer, and customer facing documentation, because I am the only one with the knowledge on the subject matter. Some things are filtered to the tech writer so tech writing has been reduced.
Simply, don't call me or contact me for simple questions. Give me a real problem that others cannot solve. Some people like customer service or being able to be the one that helps. Documentation allows me to not be that person and focus on other things.
There is only two ways to communicate to a person on how to use that tool only you created. 1) Showing them how to do it. 2) Giving them documentation so they only contact when needed. Option #2 takes time to save time in the long run that can be diverted else where.
Documentation is part of any product design and software based solution. That new feature time is design, implementation, QA, documentation, and release.
It's not a binary thing... even just a few scattered "why we did it this way" comments in the code base is a lot better than no documentation at all.
Yeah. Being a tech writer is tough because few people appreciate the work.
But the things I really need from devs is what is the feature supposed to do and why did you do it that way?
I can read the code to know what it does but often that’s not what it’s supposed to do.
The why can be simple too. We had a dev write an archive delete function that failed but the way was because the CEO pressured him.
I’d love to know what you think documentation means.
My day job is product developer and I have written hundreds of pages of documentation. The key is to write it as you go along. Not to wait until the release is ready to go!