3 ms·

Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?”

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
Not really? Especially in an era where you had to literally write things down versus throwing in a link to a slack message onto a Jira ticket somewhere (Which no one will ever read anyway since text search in Jira sucks) Also its worth emphasizing that a lot of the actual physics regarding like rocket combustion was not understood so the design process had elements of "make a rocket engine that satisfies some generic constraints and we can figure out the black magic parts such as POGO". Not that useful to write down.
ardy42 7y ago
> Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?” No. Figuring out how to accurately describe something in writing is hard, and then there are all the details you have to leave out to make the document readable, some of which may be more important than you realized. Every project relies on tribal knowledge, and much of that knowledge will be lost unless is followed up by an equally massive project by a horde of technical writers to nail everything down.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Technical documents don't have to be readable, they have to be comprehensible (and preferably quite comprehensive too).
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    They have to be readable enough for the reader to be able to recreate what's described from those documents, and you can only test for that by... trying to use the documents to recreate the work. Which is rarely attempted, especially in large, expensive projects. (It's the same thing as the "you only have a backup if you actually restored it at least once" adage.)

3 ms·

Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?”

by teh_infallible 7y ago

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
Not really? Especially in an era where you had to literally write things down versus throwing in a link to a slack message onto a Jira ticket somewhere (Which no one will ever read anyway since text search in Jira sucks) Also its worth emphasizing that a lot of the actual physics regarding like rocket combustion was not understood so the design process had elements of "make a rocket engine that satisfies some generic constraints and we can figure out the black magic parts such as POGO". Not that useful to write down.
ardy42 7y ago
> Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?” No. Figuring out how to accurately describe something in writing is hard, and then there are all the details you have to leave out to make the document readable, some of which may be more important than you realized. Every project relies on tribal knowledge, and much of that knowledge will be lost unless is followed up by an equally massive project by a horde of technical writers to nail everything down.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Technical documents don't have to be readable, they have to be comprehensible (and preferably quite comprehensive too).
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    They have to be readable enough for the reader to be able to recreate what's described from those documents, and you can only test for that by... trying to use the documents to recreate the work. Which is rarely attempted, especially in large, expensive projects. (It's the same thing as the "you only have a backup if you actually restored it at least once" adage.)