For many years at an old gig it was either a) almost zero docs or b) meager docs in the form of Slack archives. A terrible situation no matter the choice of A o

For many years at an old gig it was either a) almost zero docs or b) meager docs in the form of Slack archives. A terrible situation no matter the choice of A or B, but we chose B and at the end of the day we had something to show. Did it prolong our dysfunction? Hard to say. When I left the culture was shifting a bit towards expecting slack convos to be rewritten as formal documentation after the immediate question is resolved, which is much better. If nothing else it lit a fire under me to improve my technical writing. Seeing someone use your doc to breeze through a challenge is a special feeling. A good manager will notice that. By analogy, chat tools are the coal-fired plant to more formal documentation's solar. Coal is comparatively easy and will get you bootstrapped, but it will wreck your environment. Use it to get to solar and things will be OK.