How well maintained is the documentation in your company?

Question

Writing documentation is hard and we all know it's not really incentivized to do it besides knowing that it will save us and team members headaches later on or stop a system from falling over when some poor eng has to take it over months or years later. I also know every boss I've ever had wanted documentation, or at the very least paid lip service to the idea.I've only worked at one company now where the documentation was meticulous and not half done or just not done at all and I'm curious is this normal for everyone else or have I just been in some minima where this stuff doesn't happen?

Nadya · Accepted Answer

I've written >90% of the existing documentation as well as additional in-house tools to aid in my writing documentation that are themselves documented and shared in the documentation in hopes others will help write some of the documentation.
Every other tech loves and makes use of my documentation - it is one of the most referenced things in the company even by the techs who should be the ones writing the documentation for their code in the first place. Most of the existing documentation is documenting the undocumented features released by another tech department. I left the company for a year and when I returned there were only 3 new additions to the documentation, each one minor, and about 15~ new, undocumented features for our next iteration of our product. I've spent the last few weeks digging into the code and writing documentation for these new editions.
If I didn't care about documentation as much as I can't imagine there would be any documentation at all.

ta988 · Answer

I posted something related to your request earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27157429 I would like to see more discussions around these documentation questions.