161–170 of 278 posts
I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers' problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being. I revise my local public transit guide every time I expe…
During the nineties of the last century I was still naive enough to believe that the great improvements in technology, i.e. the widespread availability of powerful word processors and the availability of the Internet for extremely cheap distribution will lead to an improvement in the quality of technical documentation and to easy access to it for everybody.
The reverse has happened, the quality of the technical documentation has become worse and worse, with very rare exceptions, and the access to much of what has remained has become very restricted, either by requiring NDAs or by requiring very high prices (e.g. big annual fees for membership to some industry standards organization).
A likely explanation for the worse and worse technical documentation is a reduction in the number of professional technical writers.
It is very obvious that the current management of most big companies does not understand at all the value of competent technical writers and of good product documentation; not only for their customers and potential customers, but also for their internal R&D teams or customer support teams.
I have worked for several decades at many companies, very big and very small, on several continents, but, unfortunately only at one of them the importance of technical documentation was well understood by the management, therefore the hardware and software developers had an adequate amount of time planned for writing documentation in their schedules for product development. Despite the fact that the project schedules at that company appeared to allocate much more time for "non-productive tasks" like documentation, than in other places, in reality it was there where the R&D projects were completed the fastest and with the least delays over the initially estimated completion time, one important factor being that every developer understood very well what must be done in the future and what has already been done and why.
Writers become more productive = less writers needed not 0 but less.
That’s current step. Now if the promise of cursor that capable of Multi week system to be automated completely. All the internal docs become ai driven .
So only exception are external docs . But … if all software is written by machine there are no readers .
This obviously a vector not a current state :( very dark and gloom
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Why do you think this outcome is more likely?
Because this is what capital has told us. Capital always wants to reduce the labour cost to $0.
I will share my experience, hopefully it answers some questions to tech writers. I was terrible writer, but we had to write good docs and make it easy for our customers to integrate with our products. So, I prepared the context to our tech writers and they have created nice documentation pages. The cycle was (reasonably takes 1 week, depending on tech writer workload): 1. prepare context 2. create ticket to tech writ…
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There's another scenario... 100 companies employ 1000 engineers
The person you're replying to is obviously and explicitly aware that that is another scenario, and the whole point of their comment was to argue against it and explain why they think something else is more likely. Merely restating the thing they were already arguing against adds nothing to the discussion.
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You are right. We are seeing a transition from the user as a customer to the user as a resource. It's almost like a cartel of shitty treatment. I don't work for the public transit company; I introduce immigrants to Berlin's public transit. To answer to the broader question, good documentation is one of the many little things that affect how you feel about a company. The BVG clearly cares about that, because their mar…
Counterpoint - I think it’s going to become much easier for hobbyists and motivated small companies to make bigger projects. I expect to see more OSS, more competition, and eventually better quality-per-price (probably even better absolute quality at the “$0 / sell your data” tier). Sure, the megacorps may start rotting from the inside out, but we already see a retrenchment to smaller private communities, and if more…
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If labor cost is close to $0, even more businesses that weren’t viable before would become viable. Do you not see the logic?
ai is bad because it's automated his job. luddites in tech. a real contradiction