How I learned to love writing tech documentation and how you can get other people to love it too (including yourself). A thread.
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Misconception 2: Developers never write documentation. Aka “I asked for documentation and was sent a giant email chain”
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Look at a blank piece of paper. Then think: “what should I write here for some people who are not me but who might want to know something about all of this stuff. I know? Plus, I majored in tech, not biz writing!”
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That’s what developers go through when you ask them “Hey, can you write me some documentation?” Also, developers are not always the best at Confluence etc b/c it’s not their primary tool.
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Now, think about this from a dev perspective: “Oh wow, I was asked to fill out this skeleton form of docs that asks me all the key questions they want to know! This is so easy, done.”
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You might occasionally get someone who says: “This feels like more work, why should I do this?” To which I answer: “You can do this once and never get asked these question again. Or not, and we can keep pestering you with questions every time a new hire joins.”
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Misconception 3: nobody ever reads documentation
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“Nobody”, “never”, “always” and “everyone” are big words. If you spend 30 minutes writing a doc that ONLY ONE PERSON reads and it saves them several hours of time. You just saved the company potentially thousands of $$$
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Another example: it’s the middle of a giant outage and the CEO asks “How the F does this work?” And you can say “Here is a quick recap I wrote a few months ago that you can read while I fix it”. Only one person may read it but it was the right person.
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3rd example: I’ve written tons of documentation and at times thought: “Is anybody reading this??” And then one of the devs said “I was in a meeting and someone asked ‘who is going to doc this?’ ‘Easy! Alex! We all read his docs b/c they are great’ “
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Moral of the story: write docs. People will read them (even if they don’t tell you).
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Misconception 4: We all know it so why write it down.
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I once worked at a firm that had a Sunday startup procedure where the ENTIRE tech stack came up in a 15 minute window. Something broke during my rotation so I thought: “This seems important so let me wrote this down.” and then I showed it to more senior folks...
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Everyone said “there are multiple things wrong with this documentation.” The kicker: they didn’t agree what was wrong! Eg There were different versions of what Step 3 was. For a 10 year old process that everyone “totally knew how it worked.”
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In other words, writing things down created a common shared “touchstone” that people can “diff” vs their own mental model. When people realize their mental models don’t align, it’s MAGIC to watch the adjustments happen.
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