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I've encountered engineers who takes things too literally for this to work: Me: "should this be documented in the team wiki?" Engineer: "Probably" "should we d
by thirteen37 12y ago
I've encountered engineers who takes things too literally for this to work:
Me: "should this be documented in the team wiki?"
Engineer: "Probably"
"should we document it now before we forget?"
"Okay"
"um, do you want to do it? I could do it for you after I'm done with my tasks if you need help"
"okay, you do it"
whoosh hint not taken. It's not rare either since the stereotype of socially awkward literal engineers is not entirely undeserved.
- gknoy 12y agoDon't volunteer for that! Of course they will say yes, just as if someone asked if you wanted them to document something, or just as customers always say yes if you ask if they want a feature! Just tell them, "... You should document this in team wiki before we merge this."
- mhomde 12y agoOne approach I took in a recent project was keeping the documentation in documentation folders under each project, using markdown. It was good because documentation was tied to the source control and easy to locate and read when you were working on the project. It's easy that wiki's become neglected and forgotten if there's not someone that "cracks the whip" so to speak so I think any way to lessen the friction and bring it into the coding environment is a good one
- usefulcat 12y agoThat's different. You're describing an attempt to get a particular answer to a completely subjective question via hinting, whereas in the GP comment the recommendation is to ask questions about matters which have objective answers (e.g., "does this loop terminate?").
- dasmoth 12y agoWhat's the engineer doing at the time? What are you doing? Why shouldn't you be the one writing the docs?