Lessons from six years as a solo consultant

Re:Lessons from six years as a solo consultant by humanrebar on Sunday January 05, 2020 @12:30AM (#21959835)

Specs, reference docs, how-tos, tutorials, and explanations are all different types of documentation. They have different tones, amounts of detail, structures, and purposes. It's impossible to do all of the above in one document except in trivial cases.

So at the risk of having opinions that overreach the context I was given here, I'll argue that the materials were not "perfect", no matter how thorough.

In fact, I think it's possible to edit what you wrote a little and make the word "perfect" ironic. If someone is making colleagues emotional, that's a red flag that the approach to documentation leaves room for improvement, for instance. Good writing requires empathy for the audience.

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Re:Lessons from six years as a solo consultant by wj on Sunday January 05, 2020 @08:44AM (#21961207)

My guess would be that he has created all of this documentation and that nobody is reading it. Everywhere else in the company there is probably a culture of creating project requirements with a series of meetings and emails and it doesn't even occur to his colleagues that there is another way or place they are stored.

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Re:Lessons from six years as a solo consultant by humanrebar on Sunday January 05, 2020 @06:49PM (#21965152)

> ...nobody is reading it.

I'm questioning the value of just shipping docs without following up that they meet their purpose(s). That's what I mean by empathy.

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