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Yes In my current role (high-assurance deterministic code for self-driving cars, one of the top-tier players, a company who claims to be "safety obsessed"), we
by 3o495u 2y ago
Yes
In my current role (high-assurance deterministic code for self-driving cars, one of the top-tier players, a company who claims to be "safety obsessed"), we have close to zero documentation. Every team or department has their own standards for documentation. Documentation is always back-written after coding is complete. Requirements are written after code is complete. For the past year, I've been given tons of praise at department meetings, "look at so and so, they've written so much really good documentation, their docs are the standard everyone else needs to follow", and then when it comes time for promotions my managers tell me "well, you haven't shipped as much code as other people on the team .... absolutely you've done a terrific job with documentation and we totally recognize you caught a ton of problems before they became problems, but promotions are really based on 'results', and 'results' means how much code you wrote ....". So I'm job hunting.
- brookst 2y agoAh yes, the old “we’re really looking for people who know how to game the metrics rather than wasting time on long term value to the company and our customers” conversation. Sorry to hear it, but wow do I know just what you mean.
- bumby 2y agoAnecdotal personal experience in safety-critical design: A team was tasked with modernizing their multi-million dollar decades old test stand. The entire time they were cursing previous engineers for their lack of documentation that made reverse engineering difficult. Then when it came time for them to produce the documentation on their own design, they balked at the idea. I had a conversation with them about how they are screwing over the future engineers just like they were screwed over, but they still maintained cost/schedule pressure was too much to comply. We settled on them being allowed to go forward as long as they set aside a fund source and a date to have the documentation complete. When that date came and went, the documentation wasn't done and the excuse was the funding was used up by other projects. I feel like I owe those future engineers and apology. I don't think I'd be so trusting/naïve today and would push back harder that if they couldn't get their documentation in order when the design was fresh in their mind, they're even less likely to do so in the future.