3 ms·

Besides the fact that most people are not all that great at writing, it is also often not to their advantage to write at all. At worst, they are in an organisat

by WJW 7y ago

Besides the fact that most people are not all that great at writing, it is also often not to their advantage to write at all. At worst, they are in an organisation that will offshore their job at the earliest moment it seems they are easily replaced. In the more benign and common case, writing a lot is not directly detrimental to their career but it will not be that advantageous either. Written documentation is by nature usually technical in nature and therefore not often read or noticed by management. It does however take a lot of time to write, time which can not be spent on the parts of your job that get measured with KPIs or OKRs or whatever. This means that spending a lot of time on good documentation will make you "less productive" according to the measurements you are graded on for career advancement. I wonder how that would fare if you have a separate "documentation secretary", since helping those understand the code you just wrote has the same drawbacks as working on the documentation yourself.

Viliam1234 7y ago
I imagine one could be part-tester and part-writer. Both the tester and the documentation writer need to understand how the application works (at least from user perspective). The work for testers comes in waves; they could work on documentation between the waves. It could even make sense to highlight in user documentation, which parts are already done and tested, and which are still missing. But these days many companies don't even have testers as a separate position, so... dunno, who else is left, besides managers and developers? Perhaps the janitors could take some extra reponsibility.
eru 7y ago
> I wonder how that would fare if you have a separate "documentation secretary", since helping those understand the code you just wrote has the same drawbacks as working on the documentation yourself. Google has tech writers. Works well.

by WJW 7y ago

Viliam1234 7y ago

I imagine one could be part-tester and part-writer. Both the tester and the documentation writer need to understand how the application works (at least from user perspective). The work for testers comes in waves; they could work on documentation between the waves. It could even make sense to highlight in user documentation, which parts are already done and tested, and which are still missing. But these days many companies don't even have testers as a separate position, so... dunno, who else is left, besides managers and developers? Perhaps the janitors could take some extra reponsibility.

eru 7y ago

> I wonder how that would fare if you have a separate "documentation secretary", since helping those understand the code you just wrote has the same drawbacks as working on the documentation yourself. Google has tech writers. Works well.