Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on the document factory part?
Both Amazon and Google have document writing cultures. If you want to propose an idea, you write a doc about it. The value of a doc writing culture is that writing things down encourages rigor and thoughtfulness. Docs can be widely distributed, and you can read it, think about it, and add comments. Exchanging ideas can be asynchronous rather than meeting oriented. But also it can all get a bit carried away (because t…
There's a happy medium. Even a startup can do with some well-maintained READMEs. But the problem with startups is churn, which makes for docs that rapidly go out of date, and the only thing worse than no docs is out of date docs that lead you down the wrong path.