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What the hell is investigating a design? Also, no company I've worked for ever bothered with proper documentation, and I've never seen anyone lower than tech l

What the hell is investigating a design? Also, no company I've worked for ever bothered with proper documentation, and I've never seen anyone lower than tech lead ever do any of those kinds of things more than once or twice a month (besides meetings). I'll concede these kinds of responsibilities might be more common in larger companies or different fields, but I'm thinking more about smaller startups.

Minor49er 5y ago
I think by "investigating a design" he means looking at how a component or system is structured to understand how it works. This is pretty common as a lot of developers will get called to work on a piece of infrastructure that they aren't familiar with. They have to understand what they're working on so they apply an effective change Also, documentation is huge. I've worked with a lot of small companies and startups that have adopted it to share knowledge and to ease troubleshooting/onboarding. If you aren't doing it at work, consider it. There are a lot of approaches to it, such as self-documenting code, writing knowledgebase articles, recording demo videos, leaving contextual details in PRs, and even simply linking these pieces together so they're easy to find
tluyben2 5y ago
I guess, like you, that it happens, but I haven’t seen it in the smallest startups to very large enterprises. They all say, like everyone on HN, that they do all of this, but it is more a wish than reality as far as I have ever seen (30+ years, tech consulting in 100s of companies, for 1 person shop to 100000+ employee enterprise). The stories are always of similarly ‘utopia’ style coming in but when actually in there, nothing of that happens.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Exactly, the useful documentation I have seen is from devs recording a clusterfuck solution in a wiki so they remember how to handle it again in six months. But that is just in large companies. It has the side effect of being useful to me when I find it in search. Documenting actual software? LMAO!! It moves so fast that it is impossible for anyone to capture it.

Minor49er 5y ago

I think by "investigating a design" he means looking at how a component or system is structured to understand how it works. This is pretty common as a lot of developers will get called to work on a piece of infrastructure that they aren't familiar with. They have to understand what they're working on so they apply an effective change Also, documentation is huge. I've worked with a lot of small companies and startups that have adopted it to share knowledge and to ease troubleshooting/onboarding. If you aren't doing it at work, consider it. There are a lot of approaches to it, such as self-documenting code, writing knowledgebase articles, recording demo videos, leaving contextual details in PRs, and even simply linking these pieces together so they're easy to find

tluyben2 5y ago

I guess, like you, that it happens, but I haven’t seen it in the smallest startups to very large enterprises. They all say, like everyone on HN, that they do all of this, but it is more a wish than reality as far as I have ever seen (30+ years, tech consulting in 100s of companies, for 1 person shop to 100000+ employee enterprise). The stories are always of similarly ‘utopia’ style coming in but when actually in there, nothing of that happens.

datavirtue 5y ago
Exactly, the useful documentation I have seen is from devs recording a clusterfuck solution in a wiki so they remember how to handle it again in six months. But that is just in large companies. It has the side effect of being useful to me when I find it in search. Documenting actual software? LMAO!! It moves so fast that it is impossible for anyone to capture it.