Career

Documentation is one of the most valuable artifacts of any technology project or platform. It provides context to new joiners, avoids duplicating responses via Slack/Teams, and facilitates asynchronous communication, but it also requires constant care and feeding.

Confluence is where documentation goes to die
– Unknown

Most of the large enterprises that I’ve worked for have a large corpus of documentation in a wiki of some sort. Most of it is dangerously out-of-date, incomplete, duplicated, and fragmented across different pages or spaces. Documentation of this kind causes countless wasted hours and frustration on the part of the reader. There’s nothing worse than spending days working through a documented process only to discover that you’re following an outdated copy because only wiki admins can delete pages.

A thread appeared on Hacker News recently about how successful people operate. The comment below really struck a chord with me.

• Don’t waste time.
• Be mission/vision focused.
• Be polite to everyone always.
• Be helpful whenever possible.
• Be insanely organized.
• Seek and respond to constructive feedback on your work.
• Do the shit work without whining.

All of this will build human capital with other people in the organization, which will both practically give you more resources of help from others to draw on in your work requirements, but also increases your visibility with people who aren’t on the front lines doing the work (e.g. Management). That visibility gives you the means to move in whatever direction you might desire. It also (for want of a better way to put it) usually tends to help make you layoff-proof because people know you are competent, professional, and have some flexibility to work as part of a team.

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