this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
346 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
37757 readers
572 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A lot of companies won't employ technical writers, who exist to make good, thorough, complete and well-presented documentation... they rather assume their engineers can just write the docs.
And no, no they can't... very few engineers study the principles of effective communication. They may understand things, but they can't explain them.
That’s fair. At my company we have technical writers for the external docs and internal docs are usually written by whoever has worked on something and got frustrated that nobody in the company could give them a high level overview, and they had to go through the code for a couple hours.
Tbf though, I’ll take docs that aren’t written super well that tell me how things from our internal libraries should be used. Or just comments. I’ll take comments telling me WHY we are doing something.
I don’t expect our internal docs to be MSDN docs. But I like to read an overview of at least the workflow before I jump into updating a large project.