Comment by generic92034
15 hours ago
> This is why it's important to write things down in details and as-unambiguous-as-you-can forms.
While that might be a prerequisite for a deep shared understanding, I have made the experience in the last few years that the number of people really reading more than the starting sentence of any message/ticket/email is consistently decreasing. I often have to feed them the information in very small and easy to digest portions. I so dislike that.
Nobody reads the docs, tickets, or comments under a task, nobody really checks the code they are reviewing, and nowadays thanks to AI, some people don’t even read the code they “write”.
People love to ask for documentation, as long as it doesn’t exist. It lets them off the hook, “oh I would have known what to do, I wish we had this documented”. Then you point it out that you have it documented with video walkthrough, asked the team to read it and give feedback multiple times, and nobody gave a f.
Managers ask detailed questions about the IC’s tasks and priorities, only to forget it half an hour later and ask again and again.
I don’t see the point of fighting this, I’m sure I do the same to some degree. You just need to assume nobody reads anything and nobody listens or remembers anything, so be patient and explain everything every time… at least I don’t have a better strategy.
> Managers ask detailed questions about the IC’s tasks and priorities
I've told the various teams that I wouldn't have to phone anyone if they updated the ticket. When I see a ticket that has not been updated for 2 months, there's no way I'm not phoning the assigned person.
Problem is that, even when I was a f/time IC, we hardly ever update the ticket unless we feel we have made progress. An update saying "Chased bug with no success $TODAY, requested $SENIOR to consult with me on this" feels like a worthless ticket update, but from the client's PoV, this is valuable info - it means that it hasn't dropped off our radar, we haven't forgotten about it, etc.
I’ve been at it 18 years for different organisations and my experience and strategy is the same as yours.
No one bothers to read/understand anything until the very last minute, then they realise “oh shit this won’t work in this scenario, and it’s always a showstopper”…
But what about my impression that it is getting worse? When I (as a developer) was trying to help customers with the product 20 years ago, about 50% (my guesstimate) of the people were actually reading what I wrote, at least to a good degree. These days I am lucky if it is 20% who are reading answers to their problems more than in a completely superficial way. I blame social media and smartphones.
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In fact, people do read documentation when they know it exists and when it is reasonably written.
People often don't, but AI always does. As we rely on AI more and more, having strong docs will become even more important.
This is why I'm assuming so many people aren't averse to LLM-generated/filtered text. If you never really read or wrote what you were reading and writing anyway, the LLM can get something similar without much effort. Frustrating if you actually need something