Our work culture's obsession with meetings, which is dwindling, it seems, is due in large part to our desire to perform as part of 'productivity theater.' this has mostly been driven up by wfh. but it's interesting to me that so many people focus on performativity vs. output
I think about this a lot. "Managers" are under pressure to make sure their teams are meeting goals/deadlines/whatever, so they are anxious, so they make efforts to observe and oversee "performance". Seeing people in meetings and diligently "working" makes them feel better about their teams' performance. But what really matters is outcome...which is very difficult to measure for a lot of software teams, and even harder for individuals. The irony is that the efforts to measure/ensure performance, in many cases, actually impede material progress towards the desired outcomes.
On the other hand, thirty minutes a week seems like a small overhead to pay if you’re concerned a team might otherwise lose focus & direction entirely. Not, to be clear, that they are lazy, but instead that they could be diligently working… on the wrong thing.
It's certainly a spectrum. 1<>1s and vision alignment meetings are super important. Standups too, if that's your thing (I like them, but they must be run well). A lot of other stuff can start to get noisy in my opinion.
Is it dwindling? I think the number of hours of meetings I attended approximately quadrupled due to WFH. Limited conference rooms making > 1 hr meetings impossible was wonderful.
Or are you saying it was dwindling, but it surged up due to wfh? Then I guess I agree, though I’m not sure if it’s due to productivity theater, or physical constraints being removed
i personally can't retain any information in meetings, and i've honestly watched meeting recordings back to take notes on important info that i totally glazed over at the time. this wastes a total ~121 minutes on average, based on their estimate of time it takes to refocus after meetings.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the fact that setting up a build environment in Windows is a god awful experience (As opposed to *nix where I can just "apt install <whatever>lib-dev", I'd fork Firefox and make a build that strips out access to scrolling in JavaScript.
Dear Web Devs
Every web browser already does smooth scrolling out of the box. Your JavaScript implementations of it rarely work and only create frustration to users. Even they they DO work, it creates an unexpected behavior, which is frustrating.
This reminds me of Alan work culture [1], Alan is a startup with a zero meeting policy and a very strong culture of writing. They check the quality of one's writing during their interview process.
Alan leaders also have other strong ethos like "no managers" and "complete transparency".
I really wonder if these companies are exceptions or if this organisationel model could be replicated more widely. I guess it caters to some very specific personality types.
To me, some of the benefits of having the occasional meeting is to create a shared understanding of what's going on and also to enable a vigorous group discussion. I'm not sure I would know how to replicate that with writing alone.
Chatrooms for each team, but visible to other teams. And a culture of encouraging technical discussion to be summarized or at least alluded to in the public chat. I'm sure this doesn't scale, but for a company of <20 developers, this worked amazingly.
It was also great for finding answers to silly questions without having to bug someone.
At my company we make all meetings optional, this really helps create the right incentives both for hosts and attendees. As a result we have very few meetings, but the ones we have work well. https://www.synura.com/handbook/general/meetings/#all-non-11...
As someone that hates taking a long time to write documents and has similar resistance to reading large technical documents I much prefer to ask my specific questions in meetings. I retain the information much better that way.
My experience with meetings is that they're effective at getting people to nod their heads and say they get it, but when it comes time to actually do something, they'll be back at the expert's desk needing to go over it again.
Then again, documentation doesn't necessarily solve that either, because then you have the people at your desk who don't read the documentation and need someone to walk them through it. But at least that way you don't have to go from memory.
Turn around and ask. For small teams it might work well. Larger teams require more overhead, hence why hiring more people does not produce linear productivity growth.
Now my ability to find something is limited by someone else's availability, and everywhere I've seen this culture it's devolved into the same 1-2 people answering all the questions as not everyone has a built up map of who knows what.
Contrary to popular belief, it is almost always possible to express the 'why' (not just the 'what') via code, even if comments and/or external documentation are sometimes cleaner, simpler alternatives.
Sounds like this works great for them, and an awesome environment to be a part of.
However I'd be very curious to see how this evolves as the company grows. Personally, I am skeptical that this is sustainable in the long term. In my experience, most people are a) bad at writing and b) hate reading. And as a company grows, and the number of documents that need to be written and read explodes, this work pattern eventually becomes untenable. More and more meetings get scheduled to cover topics that are not well documented, which causes people to have less time/inclination to create or consume high quality documents, and it becomes a feedback loop.
(Edited to make it clear that I am not against the idea, just curious to see how it evolves)
doesn't Amazon have a similar structure, tho? i don't know what it's actually like to work there (anyone who does feel free to chime in) but i've interviewed and from what I can tell they put a heavy emphasis on documentation. it's tough to find a bigger and more siloed company than Amazon, and it seems to work for them.
As someone who has to use Amazon's external documentation: it's absolutely terrible. Worst docs of any company we have to interact with at the API level.
Amazon is high documentation, high meetings culture. The documentation is reviewed by peers, bar raisers, and leaders in a process called document read before being official.
Edit: Someone asked for more detail on high meeting culture. There are constant meetings between cross-functional teams, various leadership stakeholders, and ongoing operational planning. That is not including your day to day meetings within your sub team or the follow up meetings from doc reads or the new team launch meetings, etc. Amazon tech is a high meeting culture.
Read an amazon 6 pager... then try to write one, about anything. and then invite all of your co-workers to pick apart every single line of your document.
Correct. Be careful about sharing a document in progress, notes, or just simple thoughts in text. People will pick it apart word by word. Why? It is the culture Amazon created. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it's a waste of everyone's time.
Sure, but oftentimes technical documentation is severely lacking. PRFAQs, initial design docs, etc. are thoughtfully created and thoroughly reviewed, but the actual implementation lacks the documentation required to make onboarding (be it new team members or new dependent teams) as smooth as it could be. My favorite is finding an out of date Wiki page from 6 years ago that contains a partial list of API method names, descriptions if you're lucky, and then nothing else, not even a link to the service's AAA page/etc. or a high-level summary of what the service _does_ or _why_. With how many moving parts there are and how inaccessible non-platform-level documentation is, the new hire experience at Amazon can be rather daunting. Even SDE1/2s that are a year in often have a very incomplete picture of what's going on in their own domain space. Too much tribal knowledge.
this statement needs some detail, "high meetings" is obscuring that meetings use the docs (not meetings with no agenda or lots of presentations). meeying use docs as the primary driver, be that a narrative or analysis of a dataset
Agree that hiring is sure important, but I think as long as hiring is competitive, and most candidates are bad at writing, then compromises are almost inevitable?
If FAANGs started putting more weight on technical-writing skills in their hiring, we would get Leetwriting and technical-writing bootcamps. Meaning, it’s just an education issue to some extent, and there’s currently too little motivation to train writing as a skill.
Leetcode doesn't raise people's IQs, it gives them practice effect on tech's favorite IQ test. So I don't think leetwriting would work for anything except getting practice effect on the new verbal IQ tests.
No not to the same extent. Meetings proliferate because people love them. LOVE them. Programmers dislike them because of flow but everyone else can't get enough of them. I only realized after enough years outside the tech industry. Meetings are like eating junk food. They make people feel important and like they had a busy/productive day, even if the actual mental effort required was low and the measurable output minimal. Compared to sitting at a desk and focusing on a single task, it's far inferior for most people, who find that quite exhausting or demotivating.
I think that's a bit ungenerous to think that programmers are somehow different in this regard. Everyone hates attending boring meetings. And non-programmers also have heads down individual work they need to / would rather be doing.
However I agree that the extent of it is the key. I think most people actually hate running meetings (it's basically public speaking), but they hate writing documents even more. It's much easier to "voice over" something than to sit and write it out. It's also easier to enforce attendance than to police opening and actually reading documents. So meetings are the path of least resistance/effort.
Well people say they hate attending boring meetings, but when you observe what people do it's normally the coders who actively find ways to skip / who aren't setting up new meetings / are requesting fewer meetings. Other job roles, at least in my experience, tend to jump to a meeting as the first reaction. Developers will say: let's discuss it over email. Others say: let's hop on a call / grab a room. The number of meetings I've been in where there are multiple participants who don't have any obvious reason to be there, and who don't say anything throughout the entire meeting, is uncountable.
Now you're right it's obviously not that black and white, I'm generalizing. But I think devs often under-estimate how many people in a typical company perceive meeting other internal employees as amongst their primary outputs, as an end in and of itself, not just a means.
A good way to observe this in action is to try and enforce a rule that meetings must have pre-published agendas. Good luck with that! People will just work around it or write useless non-agendas because often a meeting is not to get something specific done, but is used more like a sort of coffee break to split up the day and give people something to look forward to between desk time.
Something else worth remarking on - a lot of people in sales or marketing roles never seem to use word processors. They communicate ideas by sending PowerPoint decks around, often with a density of words in the slides too high to actually project (only readable on hi-dpi screens). Where I last worked there were people whose working hours boiled down to meetings and PowerPoints. They could spend a whole week making a deck, which would only be seen by their colleagues in a meeting. I found it odd but maybe the slide templates help them structure their thoughts.
> you observe what people do it's normally the coders who actively find ways to skip / who aren't setting up new meetings / are requesting fewer meetings
Interesting - I actually chalk up that to two things: first, people in SWE roles having historically been given a tremendous amount of latitude for behavior that does not conform to "professional" norms. The freedom to dress however they want, work from home, and skip out on meetings they don't want to attend are all of a piece. And second, I think software engineering work is often (generalizing as well) less cross functional than other roles. Gathering requirements and understanding how it fits into a larger company plan is usually tasked out to PMs or tech leads, which is not something I've seen for Finance, HR, Legal, or other functional roles. So the need to schedule their own meetings is also lessened.
I was in yet another meeting the other day, and we had more "observers" than actual contributors / workers. Totally absurd. At the end of the meeting, some of the "observers" simply don't understand the meeting, and want a follow up meeting to discuss the meeting, so they discuss it in yet another meeting (presumably to appear intelligent so even more meetings can be scheduled.)
I've also noticed the PowerPoint issue: densely packed slides look ridiculous and don't project well. I think a lot of people wind up simply reading off the slides.
About mental effort in meetings being lower than solving a technical issue, it is definitively true (most of the time), even though non-technical people cannot even grasp how much a difference there is.
In a previous software job, I was participating in a trade show. It was meeting after meeting, with both sales and technical aspects (I was paired with a sales guy). After several days like this, I remember vividly the sales guy saying how this trade show was good, but at the same time complaining how tired he was because all of these meetings. I kept it to myself, but for me, this was nearly like vacations compared to the day to day usual work
Does anyone do what? Fail to pay attention/retain architecture via meeting? Because yeah engineers definitely tend keep working/browse Reddit during meetings because they feel they have better stuff to do.
> Most people are a) bad at listening and b) hate meetings, but that doesn't stop them...
True, people are bad at both but I think many people view a 30 minute meeting where they can voice over an idea as a lower lift than sitting down and writing a well structured doc (see also: Loom). Plus, it's easier to enforce attendance than to enforce reading a document. So meetings are the path of least resistance.
As someone who dabbled in creative writing before discovering my vocation, I see a lot of problems caused by people not bothering to explain themselves clearly.
As my time in the industry grew I begin to see people who were confused about their own ideas and came to see how many things we don’t even explain to ourselves. Which likely plays a role in how defensive people get about some of their ideas. They hadn’t considered these things and now they feel out of their element.
It's shocking how many people don't have the ability to organize their thoughts.
I'm ashamed that I was completely guilty of this myself.
At some degree of professional development in software, you start to verbalize things, so as to 'explain them to yourself' and it helps clear things up.
This helped me understand that 'writing skills' (in this context) are frankly more matter of being able to organize concepts more than anything else.
A dev who can articulate is literally worth at least 50% more than one who cannot.
And to your point, yes, it's funny and scary when someone can't describe something they ought to be able to.
If someone can't explain something they are actually a risk to the code.
Yes! What's threatening about AI isn't that it's smarter than humans, but that it's cheaper and more scalable. And sometimes smarter. But usually a whole lot dumber.
You reminded me of a fun idea that I'll probably never do anything with:
Train an AI which is judged on its ability to quickly teach/train _another_ AI how to do the task. So, optimizing for ability to explain.
Train an AI which is judged on its ability to train humans. I don't think we're ever going to really trust AI until it can explain itself clearly to humans. And that's pretty close to being able to teach.
Lately I've been trying to explain to people that the Category Error they make is that we have memorized our own code, but when we look at the code of others it all has to fit into working memory. It's very hard to anticipate how other people will see your code.
One of the advantages of mentoring people is that you can run User Studies whenever you want. Tell them what the code is for and what you want them to do, and then watch them try to figure it out themselves, see how far they can get before you have to stop the experiment (due to them getting frustrated).
I think if someone takes the effort to make information widely known and notice whether people understand it and adjust, they will make progress.
The real problem is that for those with authority, it seems to pay off that their disorganization affects other people. It makes others artificially reliant on them, which establishes their position even further, and there’s not really any consequences.
Imo, this is cheating at life and the authority someone gets from being disorganized isn’t real success. Real success comes from having true influence and respect from others due to helping them a lot. This is a lot more difficult though.
Oh well. All the people who rule molehills don’t stop anyone else from achieving real success, so they’re only holding themselves back at the end of the day.
I got to the point where I sign up to "people hate reading full stop".
It is not to blame anyone, because what people want in reality is answers and answers now - not searching through 20 pages of text, even if it is well written.
My tasks at work are not "read Anna Karenina and think about it". They are more "given X, Y and Z can you produce G and if yes, do so ASAP please".
Which takes us to the meetings and asking around which quite often is quickest way to get correct answer - even if answer is in a "well written down documentation".
Simple text search is not there yet, any advanced system for "knowledge management" fails really quickly in that regard because it takes effort to learn. It is either that setting up such knowledge management system takes too much time or getting used to it takes too much time.
This is why I cringe when I see knowledge management systems posted here on HN, usually these are cute toys but are not really solving anything unless their founders convince 90% of world population to meticulously fill in data in such system.
High-Documentation is so out of fashion, for all the wrong reasons. If you are designing anything that is intended to last longer than 6 months, documentation is a critical part of the system.
Meetings are great for communicating with people here and now, but only writing can communicate with people from the future. When you meet with your current colleagues, spare a thought for your future colleagues who haven’t yet joined, and do them a favor by writing things down.
Ability to use written communication is a major differentiator between junior and senior engineer.
Writing is definitely a critical skill for software development. At my last "staff+" job, I spent most of the time writing documents that seemingly nobody ever actually read. I also reviewed a bunch of them.
This reminds me of when leadership announces a policy over email. Sure, all the people who got the email can follow it, but what about people who join the team in the future? Either they find out about the policy when they violate it and get reprimanded, or they hear about it via word of mouth.
For sure! Why can't it be "we have updated/created X policy, please find it here: <link to document in policy repository>" ? Is that so much harder?
Most document management systems have a notification system built-in so that you can automatically email your all-staff mailing list when there is an update. It's very much a solved problem.
My current workplace culture (at least in the HW dept) is much more towards zero-documentation than anything I have experienced before and it has been a nightmare as a relatively new employee.
I waste so much time in reviews because I have done something non-standard despite having checked the standards docs but it turns out the standards have changed and no one bothered to update the docs. We don't even write specifications for products before we start work on them; if I make some architectural changes during the design, there is nowhere to record it. Drives me insane.
IMO there are two things that should be documented about any project:
1. The product itself: at least its interfaces, features and general architecture
2. The process of design: what changes were made vs the original spec, why, and when
If you want to know anything contained in that set of information here, you have to know who worked on the project so you can ask them about it, and then they have to be able to remember. It's not uncommon that changes are suggested and discussed multiple times within a project, or that changes are made but the reasons why are forgotten before the project is even complete.
I often joke that projects here are more "observed" than managed.
Exactly as you say - emails/meetings are ideal tools for discussion and decision making but for lasting records, you need documentation.
Agile taught us working software over comprehensive documentation, but it also made huge generation of people thinking that all documentation was bad, and not just "comprehensive" (or "overblown").
Documentation (words) is how many complex concepts are communicated.
I've built a requirements management system to handle this (https://userdoc.fyi), and it's made many projects I've worked on 200% easier for developers, project managers, and all stockholders.
I think high-Documentation is out of fashion as a reaction to agile, but things are swinging back the other way.
I wanted to read this article but the sluggish scrolling on the page made me leave the site. I appreciate the approach in the first few paragraphs I read, though. haha
"High-documentation" isn't the cure, either. Just write quality software with well-defined interfaces, minimal dependencies and smooth building processes. I want to be able to build the thing without frustration, to start playing with it in order to learn its internals and debug it. Only then can I be comfortable enough to start implementing features and changes.
It's devastating to learn after more than 20 years in the industry that the secret is "Just write quality software with well-defined interfaces, minimal dependencies and smooth building processes". If I and my colleagues had known only sooner about this straightforward and actionable advice...
That’s how I often use documentation - start documenting something, then ask myself “should the code be fixed to avoid the need to document this part? Yes, yes it should”.
A long provisioning instruction became much shorter as a result of automating it by reducing the need to document.
My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software. Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a specific, obscurely named document in Google Drive, Confluence, or Github. We've tried a bunch of search tools which successfully surface the million product documents, design documents, PM reports, planning docs, retro docs and standup and oncall notes related to any feature, none of which are up to date.
Confluence has been the bane of my attempts in finding any relevant docs. Which one is the source of truth? Which one was a draft written by an overly eager to make a first impression, new employee (who is no longer with the company)? Don't even get me started on saving meeting notes to confluence.
These days, I maintain my own knowledge base on Obsidian. If there's ever any confusion or request for more information within the company, I copy-pasta the relevant note from my obsidian bank to whomever person or whichever confluence page they deem the source of truth.
Do you have any tips on how to maintain a developer's own knowledge base in Obsidian? I also use Obsidian but I currently use as more of a dumping ground.
It's actually quite simple even without using some of the advanced features: What I do is create a directory structure for each domain as I explore them. I.e.
As the scope of your work expands, you add another sub-directory or file where necessary. Once it starts to grow in size, you can start making insightful connections via [[keyword]].
Furthermore, you can pretty much take this knowledge base with you, wherever you go, by uploading the vault file to your google drive and accessing it locally via SMB. Automatic save/backup.
If an individual employee is going to put all that work in without being asked to or being given scheduled time to work on it they should get something in return.
Being as you put it the "gatekeeper" advertises their importance to everyone in the company who needs to know about the processes, making advancement easier and guarding against anyone thinking they are not necessary.
Unless they were asked for, no? You aren't a snowflake and you aren't own praise for something you weren't asked to do. Maybe you work is great and valued (gold star), but your point of being owed something is just a bald face lie to yourself.
I do the same except in org mode. I’ll export to markdown as needed but generally publishing documents is a secondary goal to empowering and decreasing the burden on myself.
Design docs for each and every feature has turned out not to scale for my current team. Larger, multi team features demand consolidated documentation, but for internal changes we rely on quick meetings as code reviews. Part of me misses the ceremony of the round table discussions, but the real difficulty is keeping track of why changes happen. Documenting processes and cross cutting concerns is a must have, but keeping track of all changes across quickly moving teams… it’s no surprise so many teams are just rife with tribal knowledge.
First, introduce The Diataxis framework ( https://diataxis.fr/ ) for documentation. It makes people think about documentation in a more structured way, and allows you to be more specific in the types of missing documentation. (High documentation cultures are often good with explanation but not tutorials, for example.)
Second, I would introduct the idea of a Documentation Portfolio. I have a review of Agile Documentation at https://www.ebiester.com/documentation/2020/06/02/agile-docu... and it speaks to another structure for how to build the documentation in a more reliable form and thinking more carefully about your audience for a particular type of documentation.
Wow yeah, it puts into much better words than what I've been trying to get software engineers to do for a decade or more. Really awesome resource, thanks again kind parent :)
The nice thing about this as well is that, unlike a technical framework, you can start implementing many of the ideas of this framework without any sign on from the rest of your group. And if it works, what will eventually happen is people will say "wow, capableweb rights such fantastic documentation, we should go to them and ask for their advice on how we can all write documentation that good"
I'm sure these are great technological answers but this problem can be solved simply and quickly by a human.
Not every issue needs to be solved by a butter robot.
Why not employ a technical writer/documenter/whatever job title you like, even as a temp, whose sole job is to sort out the mess of documentation you have and then to write new documentation as you move forward?
My experience is that for internal documentation the time spent explaining things to a technical writer is bigger than the time spent writing the documentation
This isn’t the case for external documentation, that has to be more polished, needs sign offs and images and demos and stuff - tech writers can come in useful here
If I'm simply consuming a library, I find most real-world documentation to be pretty superfluous. A full working example is usually enough to understand how things fit together.
If I'm working on a library, design docs and commented code is nice though.
It may take more time to explain it to a tech writer than it would for you to write it, but in most cases the final docs written by a tech writer will be much better.
> Why not employ a technical writer/documenter/whatever job title you like
Primarily because it's a far, far more complicated job than that and you can't really hire someone off the street to do it effectively. Typically in a tech company a tech writer is going to know almost as much or more (after years of experience diving into every detail) about a given technology or application or API, and so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?
Also job security. Anyone doing this work full-time is the first on the chopping block, and developers who are working on documentation tend to be perceived as lower status since they aren't delivering features.
What you probably really want is a librarian (with some degree of technical background). We at least had one for a while for our sales/marketing docs--which are separate from customer-facing technical docs.
Summary: HIGH Documentation = HIGH staleness + HIGH loss. HIGH staleness is because nobody wants to do it (status is lower). Also… nobody else can do it (full understanding of what is being documented is needed)
So, to solve the first staleness part, there is only two ways: raise the documenter status, or make it somewhat possible (easier?) for someone else to do at least a part of it. are they both really that hopeless?
PS: to solve the second loss/discovery part, I think we are heading for that AI powered simple "unified search" experience.
AI can't solve search. If you look at how google did it, they bullied and cajoled site owners to add detailed metadata to the top of pages. It's not magic, it's creating incentives for people to create documentation.
First, I’m assuming the documentation is already updated (i.e., 1st part is OK = no staleness)
Second, the whole point of AI NLP search (i.e., 2nd part = loss) is that it does not need metadata (which was the basis of the now mostly abandoned semantic web approach to KM).
'bullied and cajoled' is an interesting set of verbs to use here. Is there a reason not to use metadata? Doesn't it make the web easier to index, and therefore easier for everyone to use?
If you don't include the right metadata, google won't rank you highly. If you include the right metadata, your content will get higher rankings and the snazzy preview cards on different social media platforms.
Metadata is good! There are structural incentives to be mediocre though.
>Is there a reason not to use metadata? Doesn't it make the web easier to index, and therefore easier for everyone to use?
Yes, there's a very good reason not to use metadata: it's extra work, and it's not very fun, just like writing docs for software. So people don't want to do it because it isn't "sexy" (and there aren't very good incentives to overcome people's reluctance to do that work).
Because of this, just like any job that people don't really want to do, you have to "bully and cajole" them into doing it.
A feature of docs-as-code is having the (typ. markdown) docs live in the code directories. Leaving no excuses for tech people not to update them, or at least insert a TODO.
Another idea might be, whenever a new feature is closed out, auto-allocate some percentage of its implementation time to documentation, and schedule an interview with a tech writer.
You explained why no one wants to take the job in the typical company. They would be disrespected, and likely soon fired.
But a different question is, why is no company trying to do this differently? Like, hiring one good tech writer to maintain the company documentation, and paying them as much as they pay the developers.
> But a different question is, why is no company trying to do this differently?
I once worked at a company - in a different domain - that made a conscious decision to make this kind of hire. It worked incredibly well, and I never understood why more companies didn't do it.
The context in my case was the Australian offices of a management consulting firm (BCG). The Melbourne and Sydney offices hired what were called "editors", brought on at the same grade as the consultants. Not editing as in correcting grammar. But helping the consultants improve the logic of the arguments in their slide decks: so they were logically consistent, easy to understand, and actually addressed the clients' issues. I was a junior consultant back then, and we were constantly pushed by our managers "have you seen Yvonne?" [the Melbourne editor] when preparing for major presentations.
I would love that job, I'm always going back to presentations and finding better ways they could have made the point and identifying missing context what they would need to be more relevant.
A previous team I was on ended up with this role. Strong writer with no technical skills joined the team and worked hand-in-hand with engineers fleshing out docs. It was productive for the engineers because they needed to articulate the ideas very clearly. The writer has been attached to that project now for 6-7 years at this point, and could probably stand in as a support engineer for some problems. It was a little painful getting HR to approve a tech writer getting paid close to an engineer position (this was after a few years).
I do like the sibling comment calling for a librarian. I imagine that would pay a ton of dividends if the librarian was motivated and got support.
> differently? Like, hiring one good tech writer to maintain the company documentation
He assumes that "full understanding (into every detail) of what is being documented is needed" (as I put it). So, the new hire will never get it right 100%. he will both struggle and annoy others (to forever enlighten him), which is a fair point.
But it is not black or white. Others here have more positive experiences
As a tech writer, I think this is because it's hard to concretely quantify the value that a tech writer brings, and thus it's hard to make a clear business case for.
Some companies do value technical writers and pay them as much as engineers, but they are still pretty rare.
There are three things that I think are preventing technical writing from being more widely valued:
1. Software companies tend not to distinguish between technical writers who are good at English vs. technical writers who are good at engineering, understand their audience, and can articulate complex ideas to that audience effectively.
2. Technical writers who are good at English make about half as much as technical writers with engineering skills, but they also muddy the hiring waters and drag salaries down for everyone else.
3. Most corporate-people think because they can type up a decent email they can write technical documentation themselves. They're usually wrong on both counts.
Probably not the same pay as developers but the scenario you describe is already true in most regulated industries, where some regulated body actually asks for the docs on any given product.
> Primarily because it's a far, far more complicated job than that and you can't really hire someone off the street to do it effectively.
Library science is a popular area of study but the job market isn’t great and neither is the pay. Lots of people to choose from here even without poaching from existing libraries.
> and so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?
You partly answered your own question: perhaps you pay the librarian/documentation writer too little? ;-)
Seriously: letting the documentation to be written by such a person won't be as much a cost-reducing measure, but instead mostly an approach to improve the documentation quality.
Usually a tech writer is also some sort of PM role that gets to chase developers and get them to explain what's in their head. Sometimes you have to have such a person on board.
I once did an internship that involved chasing down senior devs and generating documentation for them (needed for FIPS certification). It was a great way to learn about the tech stack. Suffice it to say I didn't have any PM role at all.
In my opinion, you shouldn't ask technical writers to manage projects anymore than you would ask engineers to. Both jobs are complex enough without adding an entirely different full-time job on top of the work.
> Primarily because it's a far, far more complicated job than that and you can't really hire someone off the street to do it effectively.
This comment is absolutely true and many, of not most, companies fail to understand it. I think the problem stems from corporate-people thinking, "Why should I pay a writer when we all speak English (or whatever language) and can write it ourselves." And that's why so many companies have shitty documentation.
> ...so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?
I was a software engineer for 30+ years and got completely burned out on it, so I left engineering to do technical writing. So far, I like it much better because I have far more control over my time. In my experience so far, the sorting-out-messes work is about the same in either field. Both jobs are pretty complex. I also make exactly the same as I did while working as an engineer.
I think the secret to not being first on the chopping block is to show you're delivering value to customers and internal teams. At least I attribute that to my survival through multiple layoffs so far.
My college degree was in writing, so I used that and a portfolio to make the transition. During interviews, it seems my software engineering experience and portfolio are more valued than my writing degree though.
Sorry, should have been clearer - butter robot from Rick and Morty. An entity who has one menial job to do and that is the reason for their existence.
In this sense it was meant that the technological solution - auto documenter tools, etc - they're the butter robots. I was making the point that rather than just shim Yet Another Tool into the stack to do a single but important job (pass the butter / write the docs) perhaps give it to a human who will a) do a much better job and b) reduce the complexity of the stack.
Apologies for the confusion.
I'm surprised how this comment thread took off. Looks like there's plenty of support for AND against. I simply meant to make the point that for some problems humans do better than machines and it can be more efficient in the long term to look away from a tech solution to a human problem.
Er, the butter robot joke was a throwaway line about the exential crisis of a robot that carries butter, not a blueprint or metaphor about how to conduct software development, please for all that is holy don't try to read more into that than is there...
I’ve advocated for hiring a librarian but I haven’t ever been able to make the case successfully. So yes, I agree with you, but the “how” of structuring and the “who” are orthogonal.
This is about prioritizing the documentation you write.
Subject matter experts, to the extent that the writer isn't one already.
In my opinion, companies should hire subject matter experts who can write rather than just someone with an English degree. I've fixed a lot of terrible documentation written by English majors with no engineering background.
From the GitHub page, it looks like Divio is actually a fork of Diátaxis.
divio/diataxis-documentation-framework is forked from evildmp/diataxis-documentation-framework, and evildmp is Daniele Procida, the creator of the latter repository and the maintainer of diataxis.fr.
I see how it applies to documents which describe things as they are, but I'm curious how it would classify forward looking documents like technical designs, strategy and vision documents, roadmaps, and mission statements.
Whoa! I love a good 2x2, and the one on the Diataxis home page is great!
Adding a caption here for anyone on a screen-reader, before I give commentary on it:
* X-axis: "serve our study" vs "serve our work"
* Y-axis: "practical steps" vs "theoretical knowledge"
* which gives 4 quadrants: how-to guides, tutorials, explanation, and reference
So I'm joining a new place recently, and it's another one of those "documentation-heavy" places where (of course) every new hire conducts the ceremonial ritual of updating the docs wherever they could use improvement. I really like having this ontology in my head now; I can see it being very useful.
Also, I wonder if the relative distributions of each one could tell you something about the team's health — or even just the kind of work the team does?
For example, between two teams who are both documentation-heavy, what does it means if one team's docbase is 80% tutorials, whereas the other team's is 80% reference guides? It would be fascinating if anyone's already given thought to relative metrics/heuristics like this.
Almost every developer I've ever seen defaults to "explanation." Reference is there to the extent that it can be auto-generated, but most companies are relatively light on reference. Tutorials are pretty rare in smaller orgs - it rarely gets prioritized.
How-tos are an interesting case. I see a lot of informal how-tos in slack. However, how-tos also are the most likely to become stale because if they're needed often enough, they tend to become automated in part or whole. It is by its very nature transitory.
I've yet to find an outdated doc that makes the situation worse (unless you assume it's correct and up-to-date, which you should never do with anything anyway). There's a reason we like RFCs even if they only represent a decision in time.
Do you mean searching within a document, or searching with google drive? I've found that google drive search is incredible, they've done a great job of indexing everything.
Interesting. Not that long ago we moved everything out of Confluence into Google Drive because GD search worked. Confluence search was horrible to find docs I knew were there.
That's because no-one bothers to read the documentation linked in the search field.
Protip: Use wildcards extensively. Differently from Google, Confluence search considers keywords entered to be limited by word delimiters. so foo matches only foo, not barfoo or footer. Use them with some wildcards, foo, and the search results starts to make sense.
Oh yeah it's not great either I agree. But the use case for Google Docs is somewhat different in my mind. It's good for collaboration and discussion, rather than a source of truth to describe "how things are right now". It's annoying if you can't find a particular document immediately but it's not the end of the world. Discussion on a Google Doc will happen for a few weeks or a quarter, then die down and the doc will seldom be looked at again. You might link to it from tricky parts of your codebase but it's not essential to a high-level understanding.
Confluence and other wiki systems are clearly meant for longer-lived documentation and canonical information. You should link from or attach your working documents (spreadsheets, slide decks etc) to your wiki documentation for people to discover why certain decisions were taken. But if the wiki's discoverability is poor or it's not well-maintained or regularly reviewed, it's basically useless.
Not a fan of Google docs either, but I recently discovered CloudSearch which imo does a better job at searching Drive (and searches emails too, and few other places).
Confluence (and all of the similar products) can be used successfully, but you need the teams to agree on and enforce a logical document hierarchy. It’s not really difficult to organize a company wiki into teams, projects, and other logical divisions if you make it a priority.
The primary failure mode I see is when people just throw random documents into Confluence wherever convenient at time of writing and never go back to logically organize anything. One symptom of this is when key information is being recorded in a hundred different people’s “Personal Space”
Taking even half a day to organize the average Confluence makes a huge difference.
I disagree. The point of a tool is to reduce work.
Most teams and companies aren't special snowflakes that need individualized organizations, and document hierarchies. There can be such a thing as sensible defaults that you customize or tweak later (no idea if Confluence ships with that - I've only ever seen Confluence installations in their already-screwed-up state). At the same time, an inexperienced user staring at a fresh Confluence install isn't going to get the organization correct right off the bat.
If you have to put in work upfront before the tool is even halfway useful, it better be really damn good after that. Confluence is not.
Disclaimer: I am a consultant working for an Atlassian-centered consultancy. I do a lot of Confluence-based projects recently.
You would not believe how special some use-cases are, especially when you work with organisations that have highly regulated environments. I've seen anything from markdown files in a git repository being semiautomatically created in a Jenkins run to an organization having built essentially their own wiki software because nothing on the market fulfilled their need at the time (now 5 years later, they realise no-one uses that thing because it is just unintuitive). I have seen organisations that have no content oversight and some who had a whole department of "content czars", whose sole job it was to keep their documentation fresh and updated. I've seen organisations that had strict rules on approving each individual change, with complex approval workflows.
If you have never documented anything, Confluence may be overwhelming, but so will every tool that has "sensible defaults", because before too long, you will start hitting the envelope. Documentation software is not like a MacBook that you just buy and start using, you always need some level of customisation.
So, is Confluence damn good? No - there's a lot that could be improved. But from the mediocre solutions on the market today, it is one of the better choices.
Does it matter what tool you use to write documentation? Confluence gets a lot of sh*t because its in the grown-up camp of tools but I know people who've got problems even with nano.
It's incumbent upon all users or members of the team to use the common tool along with agreed upon standards. Otherwise even if you wrote documentation in your own hemoglobin, no one would touch it either.
Some manager prob chose _________ as the tool for ticketing, documentation, etc not because it was good at ______, or _______ but because it fulfilled their action plan to have something, anything in place so that if the universe goes supernova, well some stuff was written down.
In my journey it seems that nobody is willing to criticize Edward Teach for the lousy treasure map he left, but rather we make fun of those who're still looking for his stuff.
It does matter because the issue with wikis (not just confluence) is there's no approval or review workflow. Imagine trying to write a large program in which everyone could just commit at will, with no review process whatsoever, and where nobody had made any decisions about design up front. There'd be duplication, dead code, the organization would be crazy.
That's the average wiki. It's a commons and a tragic one. To make docs work you have to treat it more like a codebase: clear ownership, standards, review processes, approvals, up front design, refactoring efforts etc.
> To make docs work you have to treat it more like a codebase: clear ownership, standards, review processes, approvals, up front design, refactoring efforts etc.
Maybe true in large orgs.
But for smaller companies what I've seen is usually paralysis.
e.g. someone notes a problem (maybe just a typo) in the doc. Can they fix it within seconds? If instead they need to raise a ticket then most likely it ain't happening. They move on, and the next person experiences the same problem.
IMO the default should indeed be towards everyone committing at will. Yes that will result in the occasional snafu. Fix that when it happens. (obviously not good practice for the operating manual for a nuclear power plant - but for a <500 person Saas company it is).
Disagree. A ticket should be created for any change, no matter how small. It takes seconds to write a title, body and hit submit. I've seen those small ad-hoc changes cause havoc because someone forgot to escape a single quote or didn't realize tabs were necessary and replaced them with spaces.
The default for Confluence is just that, everyone commits at will. There is no structure, tons of duplication, no standards when it comes to naming, formatting, audience, etc. I'm a huge fan of markdown/plain-text solutions, only because linters can be run that force you down one happy path. I don't believe Confluence has linters at all.
Yep, and that process also involves other people, to review/ approve the fix to the typo.
It then goes from being a few seconds of elapsed time and actual time (to just commit a fix to the typo) to taking hours, days or weeks of elapsed time and hours of actual time and forcing context switching on, and interrupting the workflow of, all of people involved.
Mandating a Jira ticket for simple typo fixes is overkill. But if you make it easy to create a PR directly on the documentation file, without leaving the tab, I don't see an issue. This is already a Github feature.
We did PR's on documentation files at my last place, it worked but it was more painful than getting reviews for code PR's. Tickets work because they can be reasoned about, shoved aside, brought back into the limelight, updated, other tickets can easily be related to them as more information is discovered, etc.
Overall the comments on this page fall into 2 camps, people who've tried it all and found what works is discipline and those who are still trying it all.
There are some really nice git-based wiki systems out there, and one is built into GitHub and GitLab. If you want that type of workflow for your wiki, it's easy to get.
The last thing I want is to raise the friction for writing down documentation.
It's hard enough to get technical minded people to contribute to a git (or style) based knowledge base.
Pick your poison I guess but I'm quite happy to have testers/BAs/directors/etc able to quickly jot down thoughts roughly than have it disappear into the ether.
I mean. I guess? The difference between having it written down in Confluence and disappearing into the ether is academic though. Either way nobody will ever find the information again.
> The last thing I want is to raise the friction for writing down documentation.
A better solution might be that anyone can write the documentation, and there is a maintainer who constantly refactors the wiki to keep it legible. Makes sure the information is not duplicated, adds hyperlinks to things, etc.
"Everyone's responsibility" sounds like an euphemism for "no one really cares". When people actually care about something, they hire an expert.
Why do you hire software developers, instead of making software development everyone's responsibility? Is that because most people suck at software development? Well, most people suck at writing documentation, too.
We use Mark[1] to automatically create Confluence pages from Markdown documents in our git repos. So we can have a review process for documentation changes, the documentation of the code can be in the repo with the code, and yet it can still be accessed without having to give permissions to view the code repo! Helpful with a proprietary monorepo.
I work in medical devices so we have to write a lot of docs. But they all disappear in document management systems where you can't find anything if you don't already know where it is. Are there no document management systems that are actually useful?
git works for us across business/electronics/electrical/mechanical/software.
The exception is daily supply chain and accounting, which due to factors like urgency, multiple stakeholders per order, high pace of handover, external system integration, multilingual presentation requirements and nontechnical users we prefer a dedicated web based system with more of a real time focus with event hooks (eg. notification, translation, verification).
Ask yourself how many document management systems are selected after rigorous tests of actual usage vs those selected after sales presentations and schmoozing. That should give you your answer.
And if that's ambiguous, then ask how often your company penalizes people for making the common but wrong choice versus the uncommon but wrong choice.
This applies to pretty much all enterprise software. It’s rarely selected by or for the benefit of the actual users. Usually it’s selected for the benefit of management (for example reporting) or for friends of management.
A good secretary (or a bunch of them) and filing cabinets.
You may still not know how to find anything, but they will.
Like a lot of other things, this has suffered from computerization making it yet another small part of everyone's job (which also increases context switching, the amount of shit you need to know and keep track of, and generally makes jobs more stressful) rather than a specialty that's the main focus of a few workers.
The benefit (get to stop paying some employees) is easy to measure, while the harm is not.
"Like a lot of other things, this has suffered from computerization making it yet another small part of everyone's job (which also increases context switching, the amount of shit you need to know and keep track of, and generally makes jobs more stressful) rather than a specialty that's the main focus of a few workers."
Nicely said. I am getting really stressed out how complex things are becoming. It's already hard to keep up with git, Jira, Bitbucket, AWS, k8s, Helm, JS frameworks, databases and whatsoever. But then add hard to use document management systems and f...ed up processes that are mainly designed for management to get nice reports and not for productivity. Now you are a bad developer and you are a bad document management person because it's simply impossible to be good at all this stuff.
I am constantly preaching to management that we need specialized tech writers and specialized devs that are good at their respective. But I guess it looks cheaper to waste time and energy of engineers on stuff they aren't good at.
Having multiple systems for docs and Slack for follow-up questions is a major red flag. What you’re describing is a billion dollar search product opportunity though. Most orgs don’t have the discipline to have a single source of truth. So you end up with this mess. Run! Or … fix it and then create a company to fix it for all the other orgs with similar data/docs siloes.
I don’t understand why more companies don’t just go all in on Slack as the interface to their knowledge base. There’s tons of integrations to enable it. Every place I’ve worked at with Slack has the standard 90 day retention policy in place which makes it impossible.
This is why I find documentation to be either useless or actively detrimental. Your documentation is the code. Unless you have a dedicated technical writer on the team whose full time job is to work with developers to document their code, it all just becomes an outdated confusing mess immediately.
Obviously this doesn't apply to public facing codebases. But trying to keep an internal codebase documented, other than fully finished self contained library level code, is a sisyphean task.
I think it's important to realize that a lot of documentation is duplication. It duplicates something expressed in code, in configs, in structure, in people's heads, or in the real world.
Duplication can be useful. But the more of it you have, the greater the maintenance burden is. (The main exception is documentation that is not supposed to be kept up to date, like a daily journal or blog posts.) So I think it behooves people to be very careful about adding documentation. Because as you say, it can turn 1 problem into n problems.
No, code actualizes the intent of the documentation and the product. The natural language description of a product shouldn't need to be discarded in lieu of some machine language.
Fair enough, but you still end up with 2 separate ways to express things. And I have yet to see a company that changes the documentation first and then derives code changes from that.
Usually tickets are written, code is changed. Updating existing documentation is an afterthought at best.
Personally I prefer any formal or semi-formal documentation (e.g. Swagger) over a Confluence page any time of the day.
Sure. But where some see the lack of updates as some sort of moral failure, I think it's usually a sign that there is a process problem. The documentation was supposed to solve some sort of problem, but the fact that people don't update it is usually a sign that either it wasn't a real problem, that documentation wasn't the right solution, or that there's a broken feedback loop in the team's process.
I realized one day that the specs, tests and how-to markdown documentation I wrote all used the same examples.
From that I derived the idea to create a "spec" DSL that could both be run as a test and generate markdown (with screenshots, etc.) to make nice high level how-tos.
Cucumber has the same sort of idea but the DSL really isn't suitable.
I think most of us approach documentation without intention. We write to express the idea, but fail to consider how the documentation fits into the deliverable.
For example, one could structure things where the English documentation is the deliverable. The code merely serves to actualize the document. In this world, we would consider the act of writing documentation of paramout importance, whereas the code is an implementation detail.
I think software as a discipline is distinctly undiscipled about these sorts of concepts.
Code is more complex than documentation specifically because it needs to deal with every issue. If you're going to cover every edge case in documentation, just write the code. Tools like OpenAPI/Swagger blur the lines.
Documentation is useful when it's job is to help understand why the code is the way it is, what problems are trying to be solved, and what constraints the devs had.
I am familiar with the notion that programmers are people who turn documents into code. I just think it's rarely true and even more rarely necessary.
Personally, I don't think documents have intent. People have intent. Sometimes they write down some words as an approximate way to communicate their intent in that moment. But if there is a conflict between the written document and the actual intent, it's the human intent that matters.
I also think that drift between written description and actual intent is good and desirable, because it usually means that the humans learned something about what actually needs to happen. So to the extent that documentation acts as leg irons for intent, I'm generally opposed to it. The faster our teams learn, the better the things we make.
I live and breathe using Google Docs search functionality. It's my main way of finding files scattered across 10 years of folder hierarchies. It works great.
Yeah, I think you're "doing it wrong" as much as I hate to say that, sorry.
Search is keyword-based, like large-scale search is pretty much anywhere. Expecting "specifications" to match "spec" is expecting too much, same as expecting half your search to match a folder and the other half to match a file the folder is in.
The main thing to keep in mind is that search is content-based, not just filename. So instead, search for key terms you think are in the file, as opposed to focusing on folders/filenames. Start with one or two, then modify or add as necessary to narrow down.
True, although this is Google we're talking about and Google [web] search is smart enough to do a lot of statistically-driven NLU-type things on top of pure keywords...
(I currently work at Google, but not in Search or Drive / Docs...)
> My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software.
How is this not inevitable if your goal is to always write things down? It seems like the way for document to be accurate is to keep the scope small and if you want everything in scope then it's going to contain a lot of outdated information.
You basically need to deprecate and eventually probably take offline outdated docs. There's something to be said for the historical record but if it's indexed--and if it's not no one will probably find it--it's going to compete with current documentation for search.
Large organizations in many sectors employ professional records managers for this reason (and many others). Every record has a “lifecycle” and it is deprecated and discarded after that.
There are docs and then there are Docs. I think documents should be treated as source code. Go through a proper PR process so that you know what the latest and greatest is. Maintaining a wiki is one of the worst ways to document. It just creates a sprawl that is hard to control. I deal with it on a daily basis but have had little success with getting my team moving to our source control system for documents.
Yeah, that sounds horrible yet familiar. Regarding this part:
> Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a specific, obscurely named document in Google Drive, Confluence, or Github.
When I'm the person being asked and know of the doc in question, here's what I try to do instead: I ask where someone searched for it. Then I update that place to refer to the correct document (and do some light refresh on the doc as needed). This works whether or not they tried to look before asking. If they did, well, now the next person who does that will just find it. If they didn't, I'm making them look before getting an answer. Maybe they find it, maybe they don't, either way I'll help them in the end if they're willing to look.
The way I did this at a company I worked for is that we had a MediaWiki. That's the software that runs Wikipedia. Whenever anyone would ask me a question, I would make a MediaWiki page or add to an existing page and appropriately link the page or entry to other relevant pages and answer the question there. Then I would send them a link to the MediaWiki page. This was super efficient. Whenever any documentation was wrong, I would update it.
One solution to this is to become an oracle at your company. Any time someone (namely someone higher in the company who is responsible for your pay) has a question, no matter how many times it's been asked, how recently it's been asked, how obvious and repeated it is in the documentation, you answer quickly and thoroughly, like a machine. After a year or two of this, you'll be able to ask for any raise, or to work remote, or to even switch to contracting. They won't want to lose you.
I will say the obvious: documentation sucks because good writing is a highly skilled activity that takes a lot of energy for most people to do, AND because keeping it up to date takes a lot of time, no matter how good you are at it, AND because leaders of companies don't want to spend ANY money on tech writers.
That's it. No mystery.
(BTW, this would also be why company financial records would suck, if management decided to save money on accounting staff and have all employees just kinda do their own accounting for the company. I SAY HIRE A SCRIBE FOR EVERY TECHNICAL TEAM!)
Ironically, it is much easier for me to write good documentation if there are a couple of meetings scheduled around it. Having 3 joint sessions with at least another person is great, first to get the "bone structure" of the document, then to confirm that the "flesh sits right", and finally to resolve any unclarities that might be left.
This. Yes, having everything written down and searchable is definitely a good goal. However, in my experience, the people in most companies have very different skills and few are good writers. So it probably takes a lot of time to create an organization that has a good process for creating great documents, let alone to transform an existing organization which can do so.
What many dont realize is that documentation is tech debt. You can spend a lot of time and write a lot of documentation and have to also spend time updating it.
I have worked with teams that focus so much time on design docs and insist that everything has to be documented. Pace of work is slow. Documentation and designs became obsolete due to shutting down of services, change in architecture, refactors.
I think it’s a bit odd to call it tech debt. I’d say something more like “documentation is part of your tech, and needs to be maintained like the rest of your tech.” It’s only tech debt if you decide to not maintain it.
Documentation as code might be a good alternative path, using the same tools and processes as software development and embed documentation tasks into engineering workflows. More insights in https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/10/12/five-fast-facts-abo... how the GitLab technical writing team collaborates.
I think that high documentation can work BUT the company has to invest in it in the way that Digital Ocean or even Stripe has done outwardly.
1. Investment - You have to hire at least a few technical writers and librarians to provide training & cleanup functions.
2. Management buy-in - You have to budget for it and encourage it through day one communication (ie. New hire training) and consistently rewarding and recognizing people for getting it right.
I mean, you're clearly not describing a high documentation culture, you're describing a culture that underinvests in intra-organizational communication.
I run a high documentation, low meeting culture by necessity (we operate in five time zones around world). Meetings vs docs is remarkably similar to the decision between paying for office space vs paying for occasional team retreats. If you run a fully remote company retreats are almost always a better use of your money than leasing office space. But you still need to pay for something.
Similarly with meetings vs. process documentation. If you're heavily remote and spread out I'd say you should cut down on meetings and being high documentation is the better choice. But again you still need to "pay" for something - you save time on meetings but you need to reinvest at least part of that time into writing documents.
Another bonus of documents is that they scale better than meetings. McDonald's doesn't deliver the same big Mac in every corner of the world by holding a lot of meetings. They have a book that goes out to all of their thousands of franchisees. When they want to add another thousand franchisees, they print more books.
If the documents are out of date my answer to my team is always "update them!" Anywhere that we're writing documents there are revision and discussion features so it's not like you can irrevocably screw something up, just improve it and let us know what you did. I do struggle with getting people to actually do it though.
> no documents about how to actually use the resulting software.
Can all your engineers see all your other engineers' code? It's hard enough to get code to do what it says it does; I've very rarely seen documentation that's correct.
Is the lack of "meetings" offset by pair-coding, dragging out synchronous conversations in Slack, or otherwise controlling engineering time and schedule?
No, (currently) fully async as long as deliverables are met. The extent of 'controlled' engineering time is requiring 1x code review from a different SWE to merge a PR which is also async via GitHub comments.
It's still quite rare unfortunately, and there are still negatives: less time in meetings means more time actually working which isn't always what you want!
Though it's offset by very generous comp as there's not as much bloat to soak up your TC. So YMMV...
well if people choose not to read or engage with documentation, they're only hurting themselves. in theory, their work performance will suffer when compared w/ others. and if it doesn't, then they for some reason just don't need to engage with existing documentation, so high-reading wouldn't really matter. the consequences of not reading documentation will either become clear or it won't
As the only person on my team who routinely documents my work (or at least who does so in a place visible to others), I definitely agree. I get very tired of people asking me things about my work where the reply is "it's in the docs, please check here: <link>." Makes me feel like a directory.
as someone who often would like to read documentation but have to end up asking the owner where it is like you describe
My problem is that there are too many pages that may or may not be relevant/and/or up-to-date, I want to know if there is a better way? I can't just read every document the company has on the topic in vain hopes for the answer. For example, I recently started working on my company's mobile app - noone has looked at it in a few months so its an ideal candidate for this kind of knowledge.
Despite that, I didn't go to confluence, because 99% of the stuff on there is half-finished drafts, and stuff aimed at our b2b customers, so I don't hold much hope in finding a solution to something which in principle ought to be very simple, like setting up my dev environment. In this case, the original project lead is no longer with the company, I had to ask a couple people who worked with it in the past, and it turns out they no longer knew how, and the documentation which had been written both didn't include it (it was customer-facing) and was also so out-of-date as to be irrelevant. I have no doubt that whatever developer made the app stopped writing documentation because they felt nobody would read it if they did! it's a self-reinforcing cycle.
I guess the only answer, as some others have mentioned, is a predictable organization system for the documentation, which crucially is actually taught to newcomers.
There are two sides to the coin with not being able to find things - sometimes it is, as you say, because you are bad at searching for things, but sometimes things haven't been made in an easily searchable way. To name just three:
- sections with ambiguous names;
- multiple sections with the same name; or
- information is split across separate sections/pages.
Worst case is that there is detailed documentation but it's all in the comments of twenty different Jira tickets.
I do agree that user docs and dev docs should be separated though, as should specifications and development logs.
> I guess the only answer, as some others have mentioned, is a predictable organization system for the documentation, which crucially is actually taught to newcomers.
Precisely - just as you'd on-board new hires with information about codes of practise for development (code styles, nuances of internal git practice, etc.) you ought to at least have a "Contribution Guidelines" or similar doc that sets out how to structure and record information in the docs.
My last job, low documentation, low meeting. Basically every bit as bad as you might expect. Every job you basically have to figure everything out from scratch.
2 jobs ago, low documentation, high meeting. Daily meetings to discuss what I'm working on and how little the rest of the team is doing. Yet nothing changes or improves.
All developers should spend time working in support. That time will make them appreciate the incredible power and utility that documentation provides to everyone...including your future self.
I find it to be really interesting for the first day or two...then I realize that our customers are often really terrible people using our product for really bad reasons and it undermines my whole faith in the project
The management really doesn't go in for meetings, especially not all-hands, nor 1:1s for us at the lowest level. We have onboardings and special messages and all those are recorded in case someone misses, it's no big deal.
Documentation: we have a master SOP document that's about a dozen pages, you can read it in an hour and understand it. There's a living spreadsheet that's updated so you have to check it on the regular. I've also helped build an aid for one particular investigative side, but it's optional. There's other documentation but it's all ancillary and optional, the biggest thing to know is SOP.
There's an #important-links channel on Slack and I do try to look through it on the regular, but all you really need to know is a small field.
We're all 100% remote, WFH team. We stretch from San Francisco, to NYC, to South Africa and coworkers in Australia too.
We're starting to branch out in non-English languages, so I'm sharpening my Spanish for the road ahead.
I was recently introduced to www.Loom.com which is this fremium screen recording app and website (no affiliation). Being able to have a certain type of meeting asynchronously has been a boon to productivity. The async nature of texting is great and adding the same thing for audio and video/screen recording has been similarly great.
Personally, I do not like video recordings. I find them inferior to text communications in terms of maximum bandwidth and bandwidth to cost ratio (time to write and read).
However, some people are much better at communicating or understanding material if its shown visually, which can be much more time efficient for both parties sometimes. Every format has a place.
I was watching a DistroTube video where he was ranking multiple windows managers, and he explicitly refused to give i3wm points for having great documentation because "it's the bare minimum". Except all the other ones had crap documentation.
One can only dream everything had documentation as great as i3wm's as a bare minimum.
I love the idea, but we should be taking pinches from our fancy sea salt. Tremendous has less than a hundred employees. Just small enough that people can probably individually track the complete state of their respective arm of the business.
Marvelous is also about to face a significant stress test with the holiday season, both from retail usage of their product and from vacations of their employees. I wonder how routinely highly-documented the agendas will be when competitors start sniping their biggest clients as their service crashes from overcapacity.
Reversion to the mean is coming — what would be interesting would be to hear successful strategies to resist it.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 909 ms ] threadI can understand it both ways.
Or are you saying it was dwindling, but it surged up due to wfh? Then I guess I agree, though I’m not sure if it’s due to productivity theater, or physical constraints being removed
Dear Web Devs
Every web browser already does smooth scrolling out of the box. Your JavaScript implementations of it rarely work and only create frustration to users. Even they they DO work, it creates an unexpected behavior, which is frustrating.
Alan leaders also have other strong ethos like "no managers" and "complete transparency".
I really wonder if these companies are exceptions or if this organisationel model could be replicated more widely. I guess it caters to some very specific personality types.
[1] https://blog.alan.com/bien-etre-au-travail/who-we-are-and-ho...
Then again, documentation doesn't necessarily solve that either, because then you have the people at your desk who don't read the documentation and need someone to walk them through it. But at least that way you don't have to go from memory.
You can't avoid all meetings, but you can keep them few and small.
However I'd be very curious to see how this evolves as the company grows. Personally, I am skeptical that this is sustainable in the long term. In my experience, most people are a) bad at writing and b) hate reading. And as a company grows, and the number of documents that need to be written and read explodes, this work pattern eventually becomes untenable. More and more meetings get scheduled to cover topics that are not well documented, which causes people to have less time/inclination to create or consume high quality documents, and it becomes a feedback loop.
(Edited to make it clear that I am not against the idea, just curious to see how it evolves)
Edit: Someone asked for more detail on high meeting culture. There are constant meetings between cross-functional teams, various leadership stakeholders, and ongoing operational planning. That is not including your day to day meetings within your sub team or the follow up meetings from doc reads or the new team launch meetings, etc. Amazon tech is a high meeting culture.
Pun intended?
So I just write crap as well.
However I agree that the extent of it is the key. I think most people actually hate running meetings (it's basically public speaking), but they hate writing documents even more. It's much easier to "voice over" something than to sit and write it out. It's also easier to enforce attendance than to police opening and actually reading documents. So meetings are the path of least resistance/effort.
Now you're right it's obviously not that black and white, I'm generalizing. But I think devs often under-estimate how many people in a typical company perceive meeting other internal employees as amongst their primary outputs, as an end in and of itself, not just a means.
A good way to observe this in action is to try and enforce a rule that meetings must have pre-published agendas. Good luck with that! People will just work around it or write useless non-agendas because often a meeting is not to get something specific done, but is used more like a sort of coffee break to split up the day and give people something to look forward to between desk time.
Something else worth remarking on - a lot of people in sales or marketing roles never seem to use word processors. They communicate ideas by sending PowerPoint decks around, often with a density of words in the slides too high to actually project (only readable on hi-dpi screens). Where I last worked there were people whose working hours boiled down to meetings and PowerPoints. They could spend a whole week making a deck, which would only be seen by their colleagues in a meeting. I found it odd but maybe the slide templates help them structure their thoughts.
Interesting - I actually chalk up that to two things: first, people in SWE roles having historically been given a tremendous amount of latitude for behavior that does not conform to "professional" norms. The freedom to dress however they want, work from home, and skip out on meetings they don't want to attend are all of a piece. And second, I think software engineering work is often (generalizing as well) less cross functional than other roles. Gathering requirements and understanding how it fits into a larger company plan is usually tasked out to PMs or tech leads, which is not something I've seen for Finance, HR, Legal, or other functional roles. So the need to schedule their own meetings is also lessened.
I've also noticed the PowerPoint issue: densely packed slides look ridiculous and don't project well. I think a lot of people wind up simply reading off the slides.
In a previous software job, I was participating in a trade show. It was meeting after meeting, with both sales and technical aspects (I was paired with a sales guy). After several days like this, I remember vividly the sales guy saying how this trade show was good, but at the same time complaining how tired he was because all of these meetings. I kept it to myself, but for me, this was nearly like vacations compared to the day to day usual work
for me this is the real failure and design documentation being shitty is just a symptom
group design is a really important skill, and people don't even recognize that its a thing
True, people are bad at both but I think many people view a 30 minute meeting where they can voice over an idea as a lower lift than sitting down and writing a well structured doc (see also: Loom). Plus, it's easier to enforce attendance than to enforce reading a document. So meetings are the path of least resistance.
As someone who dabbled in creative writing before discovering my vocation, I see a lot of problems caused by people not bothering to explain themselves clearly.
As my time in the industry grew I begin to see people who were confused about their own ideas and came to see how many things we don’t even explain to ourselves. Which likely plays a role in how defensive people get about some of their ideas. They hadn’t considered these things and now they feel out of their element.
I'm ashamed that I was completely guilty of this myself.
At some degree of professional development in software, you start to verbalize things, so as to 'explain them to yourself' and it helps clear things up.
This helped me understand that 'writing skills' (in this context) are frankly more matter of being able to organize concepts more than anything else.
A dev who can articulate is literally worth at least 50% more than one who cannot.
And to your point, yes, it's funny and scary when someone can't describe something they ought to be able to.
If someone can't explain something they are actually a risk to the code.
You reminded me of a fun idea that I'll probably never do anything with:
Train an AI which is judged on its ability to quickly teach/train _another_ AI how to do the task. So, optimizing for ability to explain.
It's organized for them, but not for others. This skill is not intuitive to learn, so it shouldn't be shocking.
One of the advantages of mentoring people is that you can run User Studies whenever you want. Tell them what the code is for and what you want them to do, and then watch them try to figure it out themselves, see how far they can get before you have to stop the experiment (due to them getting frustrated).
The real problem is that for those with authority, it seems to pay off that their disorganization affects other people. It makes others artificially reliant on them, which establishes their position even further, and there’s not really any consequences.
Imo, this is cheating at life and the authority someone gets from being disorganized isn’t real success. Real success comes from having true influence and respect from others due to helping them a lot. This is a lot more difficult though.
Oh well. All the people who rule molehills don’t stop anyone else from achieving real success, so they’re only holding themselves back at the end of the day.
It is not to blame anyone, because what people want in reality is answers and answers now - not searching through 20 pages of text, even if it is well written.
My tasks at work are not "read Anna Karenina and think about it". They are more "given X, Y and Z can you produce G and if yes, do so ASAP please".
Which takes us to the meetings and asking around which quite often is quickest way to get correct answer - even if answer is in a "well written down documentation".
Simple text search is not there yet, any advanced system for "knowledge management" fails really quickly in that regard because it takes effort to learn. It is either that setting up such knowledge management system takes too much time or getting used to it takes too much time.
This is why I cringe when I see knowledge management systems posted here on HN, usually these are cute toys but are not really solving anything unless their founders convince 90% of world population to meticulously fill in data in such system.
Why does everyone else has to pay the insane price for that?
Meetings are great for communicating with people here and now, but only writing can communicate with people from the future. When you meet with your current colleagues, spare a thought for your future colleagues who haven’t yet joined, and do them a favor by writing things down.
Ability to use written communication is a major differentiator between junior and senior engineer.
I've seen it a number of times in my career.
Most document management systems have a notification system built-in so that you can automatically email your all-staff mailing list when there is an update. It's very much a solved problem.
My current workplace culture (at least in the HW dept) is much more towards zero-documentation than anything I have experienced before and it has been a nightmare as a relatively new employee.
I waste so much time in reviews because I have done something non-standard despite having checked the standards docs but it turns out the standards have changed and no one bothered to update the docs. We don't even write specifications for products before we start work on them; if I make some architectural changes during the design, there is nowhere to record it. Drives me insane.
IMO there are two things that should be documented about any project: 1. The product itself: at least its interfaces, features and general architecture 2. The process of design: what changes were made vs the original spec, why, and when
If you want to know anything contained in that set of information here, you have to know who worked on the project so you can ask them about it, and then they have to be able to remember. It's not uncommon that changes are suggested and discussed multiple times within a project, or that changes are made but the reasons why are forgotten before the project is even complete.
I often joke that projects here are more "observed" than managed.
Exactly as you say - emails/meetings are ideal tools for discussion and decision making but for lasting records, you need documentation.
Agile taught us working software over comprehensive documentation, but it also made huge generation of people thinking that all documentation was bad, and not just "comprehensive" (or "overblown").
Documentation (words) is how many complex concepts are communicated.
I've built a requirements management system to handle this (https://userdoc.fyi), and it's made many projects I've worked on 200% easier for developers, project managers, and all stockholders.
I think high-Documentation is out of fashion as a reaction to agile, but things are swinging back the other way.
That's quite a load-bearing "just" there.
A long provisioning instruction became much shorter as a result of automating it by reducing the need to document.
Would that place be the U.S. Department of Defense by chance?
Confluence has been the bane of my attempts in finding any relevant docs. Which one is the source of truth? Which one was a draft written by an overly eager to make a first impression, new employee (who is no longer with the company)? Don't even get me started on saving meeting notes to confluence.
These days, I maintain my own knowledge base on Obsidian. If there's ever any confusion or request for more information within the company, I copy-pasta the relevant note from my obsidian bank to whomever person or whichever confluence page they deem the source of truth.
Toplevel: - Work -- Job A: -- Daily notes -- Services -- Auth --- overview --- login flow -- Client -- Logger -- Job B: -- Daily notes -- Architecture -- node -- react -- etc
(edit: sorry about the formatting)
As the scope of your work expands, you add another sub-directory or file where necessary. Once it starts to grow in size, you can start making insightful connections via [[keyword]].
Furthermore, you can pretty much take this knowledge base with you, wherever you go, by uploading the vault file to your google drive and accessing it locally via SMB. Automatic save/backup.
Are you saying this person should be hired/paid to store and retrieve the information being sought out?
Design docs for each and every feature has turned out not to scale for my current team. Larger, multi team features demand consolidated documentation, but for internal changes we rely on quick meetings as code reviews. Part of me misses the ceremony of the round table discussions, but the real difficulty is keeping track of why changes happen. Documenting processes and cross cutting concerns is a must have, but keeping track of all changes across quickly moving teams… it’s no surprise so many teams are just rife with tribal knowledge.
First, introduce The Diataxis framework ( https://diataxis.fr/ ) for documentation. It makes people think about documentation in a more structured way, and allows you to be more specific in the types of missing documentation. (High documentation cultures are often good with explanation but not tutorials, for example.)
Second, I would introduct the idea of a Documentation Portfolio. I have a review of Agile Documentation at https://www.ebiester.com/documentation/2020/06/02/agile-docu... and it speaks to another structure for how to build the documentation in a more reliable form and thinking more carefully about your audience for a particular type of documentation.
Thanks so much for the link, I wish I'd had that chart ten years ago!
Not every issue needs to be solved by a butter robot.
Why not employ a technical writer/documenter/whatever job title you like, even as a temp, whose sole job is to sort out the mess of documentation you have and then to write new documentation as you move forward?
This isn’t the case for external documentation, that has to be more polished, needs sign offs and images and demos and stuff - tech writers can come in useful here
So even on those rare occasions when they do actually document something, the documentation tends to be pretty bare-bones and not very readable.
Good technical writers are worth their weight in gold.
If I'm working on a library, design docs and commented code is nice though.
Primarily because it's a far, far more complicated job than that and you can't really hire someone off the street to do it effectively. Typically in a tech company a tech writer is going to know almost as much or more (after years of experience diving into every detail) about a given technology or application or API, and so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?
Also job security. Anyone doing this work full-time is the first on the chopping block, and developers who are working on documentation tend to be perceived as lower status since they aren't delivering features.
I disagree, I've been apart of a few companies that have done exactly this. I would suggest not presenting this argument as an absolutism.
So, to solve the first staleness part, there is only two ways: raise the documenter status, or make it somewhat possible (easier?) for someone else to do at least a part of it. are they both really that hopeless?
PS: to solve the second loss/discovery part, I think we are heading for that AI powered simple "unified search" experience.
Second, the whole point of AI NLP search (i.e., 2nd part = loss) is that it does not need metadata (which was the basis of the now mostly abandoned semantic web approach to KM).
If you don't include the right metadata, google won't rank you highly. If you include the right metadata, your content will get higher rankings and the snazzy preview cards on different social media platforms.
Metadata is good! There are structural incentives to be mediocre though.
Yes, there's a very good reason not to use metadata: it's extra work, and it's not very fun, just like writing docs for software. So people don't want to do it because it isn't "sexy" (and there aren't very good incentives to overcome people's reluctance to do that work).
Because of this, just like any job that people don't really want to do, you have to "bully and cajole" them into doing it.
1) Link to the documentation in your tools
2) Ensure everyone has edit access to the linked documents
Another idea might be, whenever a new feature is closed out, auto-allocate some percentage of its implementation time to documentation, and schedule an interview with a tech writer.
But a different question is, why is no company trying to do this differently? Like, hiring one good tech writer to maintain the company documentation, and paying them as much as they pay the developers.
I once worked at a company - in a different domain - that made a conscious decision to make this kind of hire. It worked incredibly well, and I never understood why more companies didn't do it.
The context in my case was the Australian offices of a management consulting firm (BCG). The Melbourne and Sydney offices hired what were called "editors", brought on at the same grade as the consultants. Not editing as in correcting grammar. But helping the consultants improve the logic of the arguments in their slide decks: so they were logically consistent, easy to understand, and actually addressed the clients' issues. I was a junior consultant back then, and we were constantly pushed by our managers "have you seen Yvonne?" [the Melbourne editor] when preparing for major presentations.
I do like the sibling comment calling for a librarian. I imagine that would pay a ton of dividends if the librarian was motivated and got support.
He assumes that "full understanding (into every detail) of what is being documented is needed" (as I put it). So, the new hire will never get it right 100%. he will both struggle and annoy others (to forever enlighten him), which is a fair point.
But it is not black or white. Others here have more positive experiences
There are three things that I think are preventing technical writing from being more widely valued:
1. Software companies tend not to distinguish between technical writers who are good at English vs. technical writers who are good at engineering, understand their audience, and can articulate complex ideas to that audience effectively.
2. Technical writers who are good at English make about half as much as technical writers with engineering skills, but they also muddy the hiring waters and drag salaries down for everyone else.
3. Most corporate-people think because they can type up a decent email they can write technical documentation themselves. They're usually wrong on both counts.
Library science is a popular area of study but the job market isn’t great and neither is the pay. Lots of people to choose from here even without poaching from existing libraries.
You partly answered your own question: perhaps you pay the librarian/documentation writer too little? ;-)
Seriously: letting the documentation to be written by such a person won't be as much a cost-reducing measure, but instead mostly an approach to improve the documentation quality.
This comment is absolutely true and many, of not most, companies fail to understand it. I think the problem stems from corporate-people thinking, "Why should I pay a writer when we all speak English (or whatever language) and can write it ourselves." And that's why so many companies have shitty documentation.
> ...so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?
I was a software engineer for 30+ years and got completely burned out on it, so I left engineering to do technical writing. So far, I like it much better because I have far more control over my time. In my experience so far, the sorting-out-messes work is about the same in either field. Both jobs are pretty complex. I also make exactly the same as I did while working as an engineer.
I think the secret to not being first on the chopping block is to show you're delivering value to customers and internal teams. At least I attribute that to my survival through multiple layoffs so far.
How did you make this transition? Any credentials/certifications you needed? Did you transition within the same company?
In this sense it was meant that the technological solution - auto documenter tools, etc - they're the butter robots. I was making the point that rather than just shim Yet Another Tool into the stack to do a single but important job (pass the butter / write the docs) perhaps give it to a human who will a) do a much better job and b) reduce the complexity of the stack.
Apologies for the confusion.
I'm surprised how this comment thread took off. Looks like there's plenty of support for AND against. I simply meant to make the point that for some problems humans do better than machines and it can be more efficient in the long term to look away from a tech solution to a human problem.
This is about prioritizing the documentation you write.
They're not, actually, as is obvious if you actually read the links. They're human process approaches.
Who would supply that person with the information required to write the documentation?
In my opinion, companies should hire subject matter experts who can write rather than just someone with an English degree. I've fixed a lot of terrible documentation written by English majors with no engineering background.
But according to the network graph on GitHub, Diataxis seems to be more active, although both of them still receive updates.
divio/diataxis-documentation-framework is forked from evildmp/diataxis-documentation-framework, and evildmp is Daniele Procida, the creator of the latter repository and the maintainer of diataxis.fr.
I see how it applies to documents which describe things as they are, but I'm curious how it would classify forward looking documents like technical designs, strategy and vision documents, roadmaps, and mission statements.
Adding a caption here for anyone on a screen-reader, before I give commentary on it:
So I'm joining a new place recently, and it's another one of those "documentation-heavy" places where (of course) every new hire conducts the ceremonial ritual of updating the docs wherever they could use improvement. I really like having this ontology in my head now; I can see it being very useful.Also, I wonder if the relative distributions of each one could tell you something about the team's health — or even just the kind of work the team does?
For example, between two teams who are both documentation-heavy, what does it means if one team's docbase is 80% tutorials, whereas the other team's is 80% reference guides? It would be fascinating if anyone's already given thought to relative metrics/heuristics like this.
How-tos are an interesting case. I see a lot of informal how-tos in slack. However, how-tos also are the most likely to become stale because if they're needed often enough, they tend to become automated in part or whole. It is by its very nature transitory.
There's your problem. The only use case for Confluence is when you want to hide information, but credibly claim that it's documented.
It is such a stupid idea that it makes me question leadership.
Some things are good to document there, but generally, if you're documenting code, you should do it in the code.
It also weights titles incredibly heavy, which combined with the previous part led to me not even noticing it searched the document body for years.
Protip: Use wildcards extensively. Differently from Google, Confluence search considers keywords entered to be limited by word delimiters. so foo matches only foo, not barfoo or footer. Use them with some wildcards, foo, and the search results starts to make sense.
Confluence and other wiki systems are clearly meant for longer-lived documentation and canonical information. You should link from or attach your working documents (spreadsheets, slide decks etc) to your wiki documentation for people to discover why certain decisions were taken. But if the wiki's discoverability is poor or it's not well-maintained or regularly reviewed, it's basically useless.
link: https://cloudsearch.google.com
The primary failure mode I see is when people just throw random documents into Confluence wherever convenient at time of writing and never go back to logically organize anything. One symptom of this is when key information is being recorded in a hundred different people’s “Personal Space”
Taking even half a day to organize the average Confluence makes a huge difference.
There isn't a universal note taking application that comes pre-organized for your team's use case. You have to put some work into any tool you use.
Most teams and companies aren't special snowflakes that need individualized organizations, and document hierarchies. There can be such a thing as sensible defaults that you customize or tweak later (no idea if Confluence ships with that - I've only ever seen Confluence installations in their already-screwed-up state). At the same time, an inexperienced user staring at a fresh Confluence install isn't going to get the organization correct right off the bat.
If you have to put in work upfront before the tool is even halfway useful, it better be really damn good after that. Confluence is not.
You would not believe how special some use-cases are, especially when you work with organisations that have highly regulated environments. I've seen anything from markdown files in a git repository being semiautomatically created in a Jenkins run to an organization having built essentially their own wiki software because nothing on the market fulfilled their need at the time (now 5 years later, they realise no-one uses that thing because it is just unintuitive). I have seen organisations that have no content oversight and some who had a whole department of "content czars", whose sole job it was to keep their documentation fresh and updated. I've seen organisations that had strict rules on approving each individual change, with complex approval workflows.
If you have never documented anything, Confluence may be overwhelming, but so will every tool that has "sensible defaults", because before too long, you will start hitting the envelope. Documentation software is not like a MacBook that you just buy and start using, you always need some level of customisation.
So, is Confluence damn good? No - there's a lot that could be improved. But from the mediocre solutions on the market today, it is one of the better choices.
I personally have never seen it work, but of course I've also only seen a handful of data points.
That describes Sharepoint more than Confluence.
It's incumbent upon all users or members of the team to use the common tool along with agreed upon standards. Otherwise even if you wrote documentation in your own hemoglobin, no one would touch it either.
Some manager prob chose _________ as the tool for ticketing, documentation, etc not because it was good at ______, or _______ but because it fulfilled their action plan to have something, anything in place so that if the universe goes supernova, well some stuff was written down.
In my journey it seems that nobody is willing to criticize Edward Teach for the lousy treasure map he left, but rather we make fun of those who're still looking for his stuff.
That's the average wiki. It's a commons and a tragic one. To make docs work you have to treat it more like a codebase: clear ownership, standards, review processes, approvals, up front design, refactoring efforts etc.
Maybe true in large orgs.
But for smaller companies what I've seen is usually paralysis.
e.g. someone notes a problem (maybe just a typo) in the doc. Can they fix it within seconds? If instead they need to raise a ticket then most likely it ain't happening. They move on, and the next person experiences the same problem.
IMO the default should indeed be towards everyone committing at will. Yes that will result in the occasional snafu. Fix that when it happens. (obviously not good practice for the operating manual for a nuclear power plant - but for a <500 person Saas company it is).
The default for Confluence is just that, everyone commits at will. There is no structure, tons of duplication, no standards when it comes to naming, formatting, audience, etc. I'm a huge fan of markdown/plain-text solutions, only because linters can be run that force you down one happy path. I don't believe Confluence has linters at all.
A ticket represents a process (otherwise it has no added value over git commit message) and thus creates much more work than a couple of seconds.
Yep, and that process also involves other people, to review/ approve the fix to the typo.
It then goes from being a few seconds of elapsed time and actual time (to just commit a fix to the typo) to taking hours, days or weeks of elapsed time and hours of actual time and forcing context switching on, and interrupting the workflow of, all of people involved.
Mandating a Jira ticket for simple typo fixes is overkill. But if you make it easy to create a PR directly on the documentation file, without leaving the tab, I don't see an issue. This is already a Github feature.
Overall the comments on this page fall into 2 camps, people who've tried it all and found what works is discipline and those who are still trying it all.
It was a directory of files - I think plain text with a few wiki shortcuts, but might have been some sort of early Markdown.
The editing form was basically a text area on top of mercurial.
Similarly things like the edit log were basically dumping the mercurial output into html.
No clue how long it lasted, but it was still in regular use when I left in 2012.
Wrote the whole thing in a few afternoons.
It's hard enough to get technical minded people to contribute to a git (or style) based knowledge base.
Pick your poison I guess but I'm quite happy to have testers/BAs/directors/etc able to quickly jot down thoughts roughly than have it disappear into the ether.
A better solution might be that anyone can write the documentation, and there is a maintainer who constantly refactors the wiki to keep it legible. Makes sure the information is not duplicated, adds hyperlinks to things, etc.
Why do you hire software developers, instead of making software development everyone's responsibility? Is that because most people suck at software development? Well, most people suck at writing documentation, too.
[1] https://github.com/kovetskiy/mark
There have been times I know a page exists and I even know the title/content of the page and yet still I am unable to find it via the search.
The exception is daily supply chain and accounting, which due to factors like urgency, multiple stakeholders per order, high pace of handover, external system integration, multilingual presentation requirements and nontechnical users we prefer a dedicated web based system with more of a real time focus with event hooks (eg. notification, translation, verification).
And if that's ambiguous, then ask how often your company penalizes people for making the common but wrong choice versus the uncommon but wrong choice.
You may still not know how to find anything, but they will.
Like a lot of other things, this has suffered from computerization making it yet another small part of everyone's job (which also increases context switching, the amount of shit you need to know and keep track of, and generally makes jobs more stressful) rather than a specialty that's the main focus of a few workers.
The benefit (get to stop paying some employees) is easy to measure, while the harm is not.
Nicely said. I am getting really stressed out how complex things are becoming. It's already hard to keep up with git, Jira, Bitbucket, AWS, k8s, Helm, JS frameworks, databases and whatsoever. But then add hard to use document management systems and f...ed up processes that are mainly designed for management to get nice reports and not for productivity. Now you are a bad developer and you are a bad document management person because it's simply impossible to be good at all this stuff.
I am constantly preaching to management that we need specialized tech writers and specialized devs that are good at their respective. But I guess it looks cheaper to waste time and energy of engineers on stuff they aren't good at.
People need to actually learn how to write and maintain(!) documentation, otherwise it’s just a huge chaos.
Rule 1: less (text) is more.
Obviously this doesn't apply to public facing codebases. But trying to keep an internal codebase documented, other than fully finished self contained library level code, is a sisyphean task.
I'm not checking confluence, write it in a ".md" file in the repo if you want me to see it.
Duplication can be useful. But the more of it you have, the greater the maintenance burden is. (The main exception is documentation that is not supposed to be kept up to date, like a daily journal or blog posts.) So I think it behooves people to be very careful about adding documentation. Because as you say, it can turn 1 problem into n problems.
The lingua franca of ideas is natural language.
Usually tickets are written, code is changed. Updating existing documentation is an afterthought at best.
Personally I prefer any formal or semi-formal documentation (e.g. Swagger) over a Confluence page any time of the day.
I realized one day that the specs, tests and how-to markdown documentation I wrote all used the same examples.
From that I derived the idea to create a "spec" DSL that could both be run as a test and generate markdown (with screenshots, etc.) to make nice high level how-tos.
Cucumber has the same sort of idea but the DSL really isn't suitable.
For example, one could structure things where the English documentation is the deliverable. The code merely serves to actualize the document. In this world, we would consider the act of writing documentation of paramout importance, whereas the code is an implementation detail.
I think software as a discipline is distinctly undiscipled about these sorts of concepts.
Documentation is useful when it's job is to help understand why the code is the way it is, what problems are trying to be solved, and what constraints the devs had.
Personally, I don't think documents have intent. People have intent. Sometimes they write down some words as an approximate way to communicate their intent in that moment. But if there is a conflict between the written document and the actual intent, it's the human intent that matters.
I also think that drift between written description and actual intent is good and desirable, because it usually means that the humans learned something about what actually needs to happen. So to the extent that documentation acts as leg irons for intent, I'm generally opposed to it. The faster our teams learn, the better the things we make.
What do you mean it can't find anything?
- Can't find "Technical Specification" in the "<Cool Project>" folder.
- Can't find "Tech Spec" (and vice versa)
- Can't find "<CoolProject>"
Is there some "enable real search functionality" checkbox I've missed, or am I just doing it wrong?
Search is keyword-based, like large-scale search is pretty much anywhere. Expecting "specifications" to match "spec" is expecting too much, same as expecting half your search to match a folder and the other half to match a file the folder is in.
The main thing to keep in mind is that search is content-based, not just filename. So instead, search for key terms you think are in the file, as opposed to focusing on folders/filenames. Start with one or two, then modify or add as necessary to narrow down.
(I currently work at Google, but not in Search or Drive / Docs...)
When I use Google to search the whole web, it DOES match. So how come it doesn't work when I search a small document?
Are people at the same job telling you to check 3 different sources for internal docs? Maybe that is the main issue. Put knowledge in one place.
More specifically: One place that is not Sharepoint.
How is this not inevitable if your goal is to always write things down? It seems like the way for document to be accurate is to keep the scope small and if you want everything in scope then it's going to contain a lot of outdated information.
There's no easy answer.
> Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a specific, obscurely named document in Google Drive, Confluence, or Github.
When I'm the person being asked and know of the doc in question, here's what I try to do instead: I ask where someone searched for it. Then I update that place to refer to the correct document (and do some light refresh on the doc as needed). This works whether or not they tried to look before asking. If they did, well, now the next person who does that will just find it. If they didn't, I'm making them look before getting an answer. Maybe they find it, maybe they don't, either way I'll help them in the end if they're willing to look.
Nobody knows how to accomplish this.
Whatever the solution is, if one exists, I'm sure it involves a lot of work keeping documentation up to date.
Out of date doc is worse than no doc, because it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy right until you footgun.
A lot comes from tribal knowledge/who to talk to/etc.
That's it. No mystery.
(BTW, this would also be why company financial records would suck, if management decided to save money on accounting staff and have all employees just kinda do their own accounting for the company. I SAY HIRE A SCRIBE FOR EVERY TECHNICAL TEAM!)
This. Yes, having everything written down and searchable is definitely a good goal. However, in my experience, the people in most companies have very different skills and few are good writers. So it probably takes a lot of time to create an organization that has a good process for creating great documents, let alone to transform an existing organization which can do so.
I have worked with teams that focus so much time on design docs and insist that everything has to be documented. Pace of work is slow. Documentation and designs became obsolete due to shutting down of services, change in architecture, refactors.
The best form of documentation is code.
Documentation as code might be a good alternative path, using the same tools and processes as software development and embed documentation tasks into engineering workflows. More insights in https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/10/12/five-fast-facts-abo... how the GitLab technical writing team collaborates.
Note: GitLab team member here.
I think that high documentation can work BUT the company has to invest in it in the way that Digital Ocean or even Stripe has done outwardly.
1. Investment - You have to hire at least a few technical writers and librarians to provide training & cleanup functions.
2. Management buy-in - You have to budget for it and encourage it through day one communication (ie. New hire training) and consistently rewarding and recognizing people for getting it right.
I mean, you're clearly not describing a high documentation culture, you're describing a culture that underinvests in intra-organizational communication.
I run a high documentation, low meeting culture by necessity (we operate in five time zones around world). Meetings vs docs is remarkably similar to the decision between paying for office space vs paying for occasional team retreats. If you run a fully remote company retreats are almost always a better use of your money than leasing office space. But you still need to pay for something.
Similarly with meetings vs. process documentation. If you're heavily remote and spread out I'd say you should cut down on meetings and being high documentation is the better choice. But again you still need to "pay" for something - you save time on meetings but you need to reinvest at least part of that time into writing documents.
Another bonus of documents is that they scale better than meetings. McDonald's doesn't deliver the same big Mac in every corner of the world by holding a lot of meetings. They have a book that goes out to all of their thousands of franchisees. When they want to add another thousand franchisees, they print more books.
If the documents are out of date my answer to my team is always "update them!" Anywhere that we're writing documents there are revision and discussion features so it's not like you can irrevocably screw something up, just improve it and let us know what you did. I do struggle with getting people to actually do it though.
Can all your engineers see all your other engineers' code? It's hard enough to get code to do what it says it does; I've very rarely seen documentation that's correct.
Though it's offset by very generous comp as there's not as much bloat to soak up your TC. So YMMV...
My problem is that there are too many pages that may or may not be relevant/and/or up-to-date, I want to know if there is a better way? I can't just read every document the company has on the topic in vain hopes for the answer. For example, I recently started working on my company's mobile app - noone has looked at it in a few months so its an ideal candidate for this kind of knowledge.
Despite that, I didn't go to confluence, because 99% of the stuff on there is half-finished drafts, and stuff aimed at our b2b customers, so I don't hold much hope in finding a solution to something which in principle ought to be very simple, like setting up my dev environment. In this case, the original project lead is no longer with the company, I had to ask a couple people who worked with it in the past, and it turns out they no longer knew how, and the documentation which had been written both didn't include it (it was customer-facing) and was also so out-of-date as to be irrelevant. I have no doubt that whatever developer made the app stopped writing documentation because they felt nobody would read it if they did! it's a self-reinforcing cycle.
I guess the only answer, as some others have mentioned, is a predictable organization system for the documentation, which crucially is actually taught to newcomers.
If your documentation doesn't have a search feature, that's the first thing you need to fix.
If you're just bad at searching, well that's a very valuable and learnable skill.
> like setting up my dev environment
> the documentation which had been written both didn't include it (it was customer-facing
The user docs and the dev docs should be different corpses, searchable separately. What you describe sounds very disorganized.
Worst case is that there is detailed documentation but it's all in the comments of twenty different Jira tickets.
I do agree that user docs and dev docs should be separated though, as should specifications and development logs.
Precisely - just as you'd on-board new hires with information about codes of practise for development (code styles, nuances of internal git practice, etc.) you ought to at least have a "Contribution Guidelines" or similar doc that sets out how to structure and record information in the docs.
My last job, low documentation, low meeting. Basically every bit as bad as you might expect. Every job you basically have to figure everything out from scratch.
2 jobs ago, low documentation, high meeting. Daily meetings to discuss what I'm working on and how little the rest of the team is doing. Yet nothing changes or improves.
But it's better to know than to be ignorant, usually.
https://jondouglas.dev/lets-not-meet/
This company seems to "get it" though. We ought to protect our attention more often.
I'd take documentation over no documentation any day. Even if it's 4 years old and was last updated by a person who left for a competitor.
But I worked for a Japanese corporation, so we had regularly-scheduled meetings. I was able to reduce them, though.
The management really doesn't go in for meetings, especially not all-hands, nor 1:1s for us at the lowest level. We have onboardings and special messages and all those are recorded in case someone misses, it's no big deal.
Documentation: we have a master SOP document that's about a dozen pages, you can read it in an hour and understand it. There's a living spreadsheet that's updated so you have to check it on the regular. I've also helped build an aid for one particular investigative side, but it's optional. There's other documentation but it's all ancillary and optional, the biggest thing to know is SOP.
There's an #important-links channel on Slack and I do try to look through it on the regular, but all you really need to know is a small field.
We're all 100% remote, WFH team. We stretch from San Francisco, to NYC, to South Africa and coworkers in Australia too.
We're starting to branch out in non-English languages, so I'm sharpening my Spanish for the road ahead.
However, some people are much better at communicating or understanding material if its shown visually, which can be much more time efficient for both parties sometimes. Every format has a place.
One can only dream everything had documentation as great as i3wm's as a bare minimum.
Marvelous is also about to face a significant stress test with the holiday season, both from retail usage of their product and from vacations of their employees. I wonder how routinely highly-documented the agendas will be when competitors start sniping their biggest clients as their service crashes from overcapacity.
Reversion to the mean is coming — what would be interesting would be to hear successful strategies to resist it.