The problem with attempting a high-documentation culture is that it's very difficult to have a closed feedback loop. I see this all the time. Someone writes up

The problem with attempting a high-documentation culture is that it's very difficult to have a closed feedback loop. I see this all the time. Someone writes up "Here's what tool X does, and here's how to use it", and it never works. There's always some environment variable you forgot to set, or some local file, or some path that's literally /home/$USER/... in the code, or even worse "Here's the built binary, which isn't the same as the binary that gets built from source". How do you fix this? As part of your documentation process you get someone else to actually read and reproduce and review the document. And that person needs to be at arms distance to avoid shared knowledge being elided. To enforce this you also probably need it to gate atleast reasonably large PRs. You need ways to ensure the documentation doesn't go out of date. What am I saying? This only works in a process heavy environment. Which goes directly against what the author of this article says - which is a red flag. What can easily be the case here is you have 50 engineers all building new stuff, all writing reams of documentation which probably isn't at all useful, but because no one ever reads any of it, you never pay the cost... Then you hire someone and for the first 6 months their life is hell until they clock on to what everyone else is doing and just ignore whatever everyone else is working on and plough their own furrow. Sure, we've now got 17 different poorly documented logging libraries (because no one wanted to invest in adopting anyone elses), but every individual developer is writing plenty of documentation! Oh and god forbid you disturb the author with questions outside of the 1 very short window for meetings in 1 specific time zone. Their careers page says "Join teammates from Hawaii to Brazil to Germany". Their meeting time is 6-9pm in Germany every day and 7am to 10am Hawaii time.