7 ms·

It’s because engineers don’t want to write documentation, and if you don’t force it this is the result.

piva00 6y ago
A trillion dollar company should be able to hire some technical writers to embed into teams and write documentation as part of the process. It's just a lack of care when you have that amount of money.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Just hire Microsoft's people. Not even joking. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.string.substring?view=net-5.0 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.string.su...
  - jjkaczor 6y ago
    For all the crap that Apple, Java and other open-source people have piled on Microsoft over the years, their developer documentation has always been very good. Yes, there are rough-edges. Back in the day, when Sun was still in-charge of Java, I had my 1-person consulting company partner with Sun and become an official "Certified Java" organization... Great, I thought - now I can get some better documentation... Sure, Sun replied - but first you have to buy a $30,000 server... Thankfully, .NET hit public beta about then and I have never looked back.
    - wlesieutre 6y ago
      There's an old saying at Microsoft: developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        It's mocked, but the underlying observation is astute. In the personal computing world, first parties can't build enough user software. Furthermore, software availability and reliability lag third party developer and development ecosystem health. A bad experience doesn't hurt the platform today, it hurts the platform in 1+ years. And perhaps even worse, steps to address it take effect over a 1+ year timeframe as well. Apple's been able to leverage iOS market share into papering over the desktop reality, but they're going to find the emperor has no clothes real quickly if anything about that calculus shifts in a bad way.
        jonhendry18 6y ago
        Apple used to be better about developers, I think, back 2000-2010 or so.
        wlesieutre 6y ago
        Mocked at the time, but looking back it sounds pretty good. Maybe Apple needs a Steve Ballmer.
        int_19h 6y ago
        If you recall, back when the first iPhone came out, the idea was that Apple itself would be the only provider of first-class software for it, and everything else was relegated to web apps. It didn't work out for them back then, and so we got native apps and the store. But I can't help but think that Apple still sees it as a sort of compromise of their ideal vision of what the platform should really be like, and thus dev ecosystem evolution is mostly on the backburner. Just look at how long it took for Swift to appear, despite Obj-C being really dated by that time.
    - sirmarksalot 6y ago
      I wouldn't say it's always been very good. How well do you remember MSDN? In the mid-2000s, Microsoft documentation lived on three or four separate sites, and I don't remember the names of all of them. The two that spring immediately to mind are MSDN and TechNet. MSDN had the infuriating issue of broken links. You'd be deep-diving on an issue, find a link to an article that looked like it might perfectly address your question, and... 404. It got so bad that a VP ended up making a pronouncement, declaring a war on broken links. He announced a multi-year plan to reduce and eventually fix all the broken links on MSDN. This was the vacuum that was partially responsible for the birth of Stack Overflow.
      - teh_klev 6y ago
        > It got so bad that a VP ended up making a pronouncement, declaring a war on broken links. Probably Scott Guthrie initiated that. As some nobody I once emailed him directly because I'd discovered a bug in some framework thing with a reproducible example. He actually replied and cc'd in the relevant people at MS and after a short while there was a workaround and a fix and a KB article or something (it's so long ago I barely remember). Impressed? absolutely. MS still have some pretty good and accessible folks, and I'm a huge fan of Scott Hanselman who's a great brand ambassador for DevDiv (and not beyond a few self-deprecating MS jokes about the company's past).
      - bhrgunatha 6y ago
        They also suffered the same problem mentioned in this post. Documentation pages that showed a method's signature with no explanation of the function or example usage. So many times I'd look something up only to find the method name parroted as a full sentence; and those method names were often obscure to the point of meaninglessness.
      - jjkaczor 6y ago
        Heh... well, I am old enough to remember the offline MSDN - which was great, and the rough transition to online - which got better, eventually... (and the rise of StackOverflow makes more sense in that context) but then at the beginning of the "cloud-era", IMO, it got worse again - to the point that I was constantly complaining about blog articles by MSFT employee's that really should have been folded into the actual documentation/KB instead... It's a hard sell to tell an IT decision-maker in a different team/group that you need to configure things "just so" (think TechNet versus MSDN for configuration/operational articles) when all you have to point them too is a non-official blog post... (Don't even get me started about the quality/out-of-date materials for things like Dynamics 365...)
  - markdoubleyou 6y ago
    For Microsoft it depends on when the docs were written. The MS docs from the late '90s through about 2015 were stellar. For example, look at the Windows Sockets docs[1], which came out of that era. Here you see information architects working at the height of their power: Content is broken up into conceptual ("About Winsock"), task-based ("Using Winsock"), and reference ("Winsock Reference") topics. They were doing this kind of structured documentation before DITA was a thing. It's a pain in the ass to produce content this way, but the results are wonderful. Then came .NET Core: a fast-moving, community-driven effort, where the philosophy seems to be to get it working and then scribble down some docs later. The result tends to be a huge wall of text with conceptual and sample topics jammed together ([2]), and you're lucky if the API reference gives you anything beyond parameter names. Azure docs suffer from a different problem. It seems they've tried to apply some kind of rough information architecture, but the quality isn't great. I've looked at the GitHub history of some of the shoddier topics, and they're often written by junior Product Managers who are fresh out of college. I encounter a lot of imprecise, colloquial English describing out-of-date screenshots. I don't mean to belittle the people who work on .NET Core and Azure. There's a ton of content that needs to be written for these products, and it's a thankless task for the devs & PMs who do the heavy lifting now. I'd really like to see some dedicated technical writers come in and bring the quality back up to their old standards. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winsock/windows-sockets-start-page-2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winsock/windo... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/routing?view=aspnetcore-5.0 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/ro...
    - tasogare 6y ago
      I use C# daily and most of the time the doc is fine. I agree that sometimes dotnet core docs are a bit messy and frustrating, but still quite good and useful.
- Spivak 6y ago
  It's not really the size of the company. Anyone qualified to write good documentation can make better money, work on more interesting things, and advance their career by actually working on the code. Without a culture that rewards and values the work it doesn't get done.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    Well, not everyone who is qualified to write good documentation wants to work on the code, nor would they necessarily be as good at writing code as they are at writing documentation. If you're writing API documentation, you need to be enough of a coder to understand what the engineers are talking about -- and what they aren't talking about but really should be! -- but that doesn't mean you need to be coding at a level where you could have a career writing apps built on that API, let alone coding at a level where you could have a career implementing the API itself. It's the "culture that rewards and values the work" that's really the issue, I suspect. Apple certainly used to have a culture of good documentation, and I know they've hired good writers, technical and otherwise, over the years. It's actually kind of difficult to explain why their docs are the way they are, other than just not putting any real priority on the necessary work.
  - jyounker 6y ago
    This. Developers aren't getting credited or promoted for writing documentation, or assisting in the process.
dgritsko 6y ago
I don't think this truism actually holds weight. Some engineers don't want to write documentation, sure. Maybe even most don't - but some actually do enjoy the process of writing good documentation, and they find satisfaction in creating knowledge artifacts that make their code easy to understand and use. It's not enough to just find these engineers, however - they need organizational support so that they have the right tools to create and share good documentation, and are appropriately encouraged to do so.
jonhendry18 6y ago
You have to give them time to write it, too.
RockmanZero 6y ago
wrong! bad engineers don’t want to write documentation

A trillion dollar company should be able to hire some technical writers to embed into teams and write documentation as part of the process. It's just a lack of care when you have that amount of money.

ethbr0 6y ago
Just hire Microsoft's people. Not even joking. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.string.substring?view=net-5.0 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.string.su...
- jjkaczor 6y ago
  For all the crap that Apple, Java and other open-source people have piled on Microsoft over the years, their developer documentation has always been very good. Yes, there are rough-edges. Back in the day, when Sun was still in-charge of Java, I had my 1-person consulting company partner with Sun and become an official "Certified Java" organization... Great, I thought - now I can get some better documentation... Sure, Sun replied - but first you have to buy a $30,000 server... Thankfully, .NET hit public beta about then and I have never looked back.
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    There's an old saying at Microsoft: developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      It's mocked, but the underlying observation is astute. In the personal computing world, first parties can't build enough user software. Furthermore, software availability and reliability lag third party developer and development ecosystem health. A bad experience doesn't hurt the platform today, it hurts the platform in 1+ years. And perhaps even worse, steps to address it take effect over a 1+ year timeframe as well. Apple's been able to leverage iOS market share into papering over the desktop reality, but they're going to find the emperor has no clothes real quickly if anything about that calculus shifts in a bad way.
      - jonhendry18 6y ago
        Apple used to be better about developers, I think, back 2000-2010 or so.
      - wlesieutre 6y ago
        Mocked at the time, but looking back it sounds pretty good. Maybe Apple needs a Steve Ballmer.
      - int_19h 6y ago
        If you recall, back when the first iPhone came out, the idea was that Apple itself would be the only provider of first-class software for it, and everything else was relegated to web apps. It didn't work out for them back then, and so we got native apps and the store. But I can't help but think that Apple still sees it as a sort of compromise of their ideal vision of what the platform should really be like, and thus dev ecosystem evolution is mostly on the backburner. Just look at how long it took for Swift to appear, despite Obj-C being really dated by that time.
  - sirmarksalot 6y ago
    I wouldn't say it's always been very good. How well do you remember MSDN? In the mid-2000s, Microsoft documentation lived on three or four separate sites, and I don't remember the names of all of them. The two that spring immediately to mind are MSDN and TechNet. MSDN had the infuriating issue of broken links. You'd be deep-diving on an issue, find a link to an article that looked like it might perfectly address your question, and... 404. It got so bad that a VP ended up making a pronouncement, declaring a war on broken links. He announced a multi-year plan to reduce and eventually fix all the broken links on MSDN. This was the vacuum that was partially responsible for the birth of Stack Overflow.
    - teh_klev 6y ago
      > It got so bad that a VP ended up making a pronouncement, declaring a war on broken links. Probably Scott Guthrie initiated that. As some nobody I once emailed him directly because I'd discovered a bug in some framework thing with a reproducible example. He actually replied and cc'd in the relevant people at MS and after a short while there was a workaround and a fix and a KB article or something (it's so long ago I barely remember). Impressed? absolutely. MS still have some pretty good and accessible folks, and I'm a huge fan of Scott Hanselman who's a great brand ambassador for DevDiv (and not beyond a few self-deprecating MS jokes about the company's past).
    - bhrgunatha 6y ago
      They also suffered the same problem mentioned in this post. Documentation pages that showed a method's signature with no explanation of the function or example usage. So many times I'd look something up only to find the method name parroted as a full sentence; and those method names were often obscure to the point of meaninglessness.
    - jjkaczor 6y ago
      Heh... well, I am old enough to remember the offline MSDN - which was great, and the rough transition to online - which got better, eventually... (and the rise of StackOverflow makes more sense in that context) but then at the beginning of the "cloud-era", IMO, it got worse again - to the point that I was constantly complaining about blog articles by MSFT employee's that really should have been folded into the actual documentation/KB instead... It's a hard sell to tell an IT decision-maker in a different team/group that you need to configure things "just so" (think TechNet versus MSDN for configuration/operational articles) when all you have to point them too is a non-official blog post... (Don't even get me started about the quality/out-of-date materials for things like Dynamics 365...)
- markdoubleyou 6y ago
  For Microsoft it depends on when the docs were written. The MS docs from the late '90s through about 2015 were stellar. For example, look at the Windows Sockets docs[1], which came out of that era. Here you see information architects working at the height of their power: Content is broken up into conceptual ("About Winsock"), task-based ("Using Winsock"), and reference ("Winsock Reference") topics. They were doing this kind of structured documentation before DITA was a thing. It's a pain in the ass to produce content this way, but the results are wonderful. Then came .NET Core: a fast-moving, community-driven effort, where the philosophy seems to be to get it working and then scribble down some docs later. The result tends to be a huge wall of text with conceptual and sample topics jammed together ([2]), and you're lucky if the API reference gives you anything beyond parameter names. Azure docs suffer from a different problem. It seems they've tried to apply some kind of rough information architecture, but the quality isn't great. I've looked at the GitHub history of some of the shoddier topics, and they're often written by junior Product Managers who are fresh out of college. I encounter a lot of imprecise, colloquial English describing out-of-date screenshots. I don't mean to belittle the people who work on .NET Core and Azure. There's a ton of content that needs to be written for these products, and it's a thankless task for the devs & PMs who do the heavy lifting now. I'd really like to see some dedicated technical writers come in and bring the quality back up to their old standards. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winsock/windows-sockets-start-page-2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winsock/windo... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/routing?view=aspnetcore-5.0 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/ro...
  - tasogare 6y ago
    I use C# daily and most of the time the doc is fine. I agree that sometimes dotnet core docs are a bit messy and frustrating, but still quite good and useful.
Spivak 6y ago
It's not really the size of the company. Anyone qualified to write good documentation can make better money, work on more interesting things, and advance their career by actually working on the code. Without a culture that rewards and values the work it doesn't get done.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  Well, not everyone who is qualified to write good documentation wants to work on the code, nor would they necessarily be as good at writing code as they are at writing documentation. If you're writing API documentation, you need to be enough of a coder to understand what the engineers are talking about -- and what they aren't talking about but really should be! -- but that doesn't mean you need to be coding at a level where you could have a career writing apps built on that API, let alone coding at a level where you could have a career implementing the API itself. It's the "culture that rewards and values the work" that's really the issue, I suspect. Apple certainly used to have a culture of good documentation, and I know they've hired good writers, technical and otherwise, over the years. It's actually kind of difficult to explain why their docs are the way they are, other than just not putting any real priority on the necessary work.
- jyounker 6y ago
  This. Developers aren't getting credited or promoted for writing documentation, or assisting in the process.

dgritsko 6y ago

I don't think this truism actually holds weight. Some engineers don't want to write documentation, sure. Maybe even most don't - but some actually do enjoy the process of writing good documentation, and they find satisfaction in creating knowledge artifacts that make their code easy to understand and use. It's not enough to just find these engineers, however - they need organizational support so that they have the right tools to create and share good documentation, and are appropriately encouraged to do so.

jonhendry18 6y ago

You have to give them time to write it, too.

RockmanZero 6y ago

wrong! bad engineers don’t want to write documentation