Documentation for the product I'm working on recently hit 3k pages PDF (it's split in 6 volumes). Most of this documentation was created because there was no p

Documentation for the product I'm working on recently hit 3k pages PDF (it's split in 6 volumes). Most of this documentation was created because there was no product management. No, really... some customer-facing guy would come and talk to the guy who he knew from R&D, and they would cook up some stuff and add it to the product. And then QA or the customer would start pulling their hair because of how badly this stuff was designed. Then, because the bogus piece of code was already released, the documentation would "catch up" by listing all the gotchas. Another way documentation was written was when there wasn't even time to roll out the piece of code as in the example above, and instead of writing the code to do something the documentation would be augmented with instructions for the customer for how to do that themselves. Most notably the whole upgrade thing is given to the customer as documentation, where in no less than some 30 odd steps a customer may upgrade or totally ruin their multi-million production system. Splitting documentation into multiple volumes (by subject) had an interesting effect of increasing the overall volume substantially as some subjects had to be repeated across multiple files. As a cherry on top, we also have a handful of diagrams in this documentation which are rotated 90 degrees. Because they didn't fit on a vertical page of PDF designed for printing. Computer users be damned! All in all, our documentation doesn't serve the purpose of educating users on what they can do with the system. It's a liability mitigation. Deliberately written in passive voice it makes it hard to guess whether the system or the user are responsible for carrying out the action. And, spreading the contents out across multiple chapters in multiple volumes makes it more likely that the user can be led to believe that instructions were always there, but they never found them. Or that some defects were documented, but they didn't know better than to read the section were they were documented. On the other hand, the documentation that is supplied interactively with the system (eg. for the command-line tools or GUI wizards) is very terse and usually simply repeats the name of the command or the title on the button. BTW, we also have a customer support division that's bigger than any R&D department :)