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In work in medical devices so we have to do a lot of documentation. In order to stay “lean” we have only a few tech writers so at every project the engineers h
by Ididntdothis 6y ago
In work in medical devices so we have to do a lot of documentation. In order to stay “lean” we have only a few tech writers so at every project the engineers have to figure what docs to produce and then push them through various review processes. This takes a lot of time so the most senior engineers are spending way more time on the documentation process than they do thinking about technology. The tech almost feels like a side effect.
And in every project there is a ton of discussion about what regulatory process to use. Instead of figuring this out beforehand usually it holds up the whole development process for a long time. It can be really frustrating.
- DenisM 6y agoDo you think this is wrong? I’m not jesting, I want to discuss this. I often times find that making functionality takes me barely 30% there. Making even a short stand up status update that drives the point to the whole team is very valuable - it energizes everyone seeing that good progress is being made, it makes sales (they also do customer development) know to push new things or inquire about adjacent needs, informs support of what’s possible and worth asking about. Then there are more detailed feature lay downs, for the same reason. Then there is the interface itself. And fumbling through often imprecise and sometimes angry customer requests. It’s all non-feature work, and it takes huge amount of time, but it seems very valuable in the end, however non-fun it seems. So I’m wondering if I’m a regulated work like yours there is similar benefit to non-feature work?
- Ididntdothis 6y agoWriting docs and stuff is fine but the whole submission and review process is very convoluted and arcane. If we had some people who do this all the time they would get proficient at this. Right now a lot of the docs have a ton of errors that easily could be avoid that way. So it eats up a lot of engineering time plus the output is low quality.