I do agree with this in the end. I also think people often underestimate how challenging it is to create good docs.
I've seen this pattern often:
- Person doesn't know how to do something.
- They fumble around until they get it working.
- Once it's finally working, they write a doc about how they did it (because our "poor documentation" is a common pain point and therefore a popular problem to attack).
- If you actually search our internal docs, you find at least one other doc describing the same process.
I've seen this happen in many different contexts, even onboarding. I've seen multiple people join the company, and each one wrote down their own "onboarding painpoints" doc to hopefully help the next person, without even noticing the existence of the previous person's equivalent doc.
So again, I still agree with you. Even in these scenarios I described, I'm willing to believe that there is some way we could've structured our docs that couldn't prevented these issues. But I have no idea what it is, and seeing all the futile attempts at improving the situation makes me irk a little at armchair "poor docs"-style comments (not that that's even related. I've gone a little off topic here!)
I've seen this pattern often:
- Person doesn't know how to do something.
- They fumble around until they get it working.
- Once it's finally working, they write a doc about how they did it (because our "poor documentation" is a common pain point and therefore a popular problem to attack).
- If you actually search our internal docs, you find at least one other doc describing the same process.
I've seen this happen in many different contexts, even onboarding. I've seen multiple people join the company, and each one wrote down their own "onboarding painpoints" doc to hopefully help the next person, without even noticing the existence of the previous person's equivalent doc.
So again, I still agree with you. Even in these scenarios I described, I'm willing to believe that there is some way we could've structured our docs that couldn't prevented these issues. But I have no idea what it is, and seeing all the futile attempts at improving the situation makes me irk a little at armchair "poor docs"-style comments (not that that's even related. I've gone a little off topic here!)