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Discussion on: How Google, Twitter, and Spotify built a culture of documentation

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niklasbegley profile image
Nik Begley

You make a good point Doug - the cultural change has to include people at the top of the engineering organization. They have to understand that without investing in docs they increase their tech debt that can slow down the whole engineering org. My hope is that over time, just like with automated testing, engineers at all parts of the org chart will come to ask for documentation with all projects.

My suspicion is that many overestimate the cost of maintaining documentation. If you have a system in place, incremental improvements to docs don't have to be a huge burden that suck time away from other engineering tasks.

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dougaws profile image
Doug

And underestimate the damage that inaccurate docs have on users' opinions. Once a user discovers inaccurate content, they are leery of trusting anything else you say.