Agreed. FWIW we technical writers (TWs) are well aware that we'd have more business-world respect if we could show more causation between our work and desired business outcomes. Turns out it's a tough nut to crack, judging by all the TWs I've seen work on this problem over the years without figuring out broadly scalable and repeatable systems. So we're stuck in this suboptimal zone where biz leaders know they can't get rid of us completely because Bad Things Clearly Happen More when you stop having someone dedicated to docs, but we often can't show compelling value beyond that.

There was a fascinating report last year suggesting that above-quality docs correlate with increased eng productivity across the board. My intuition says it's true but IMO we need to do more work proving that this connection is legit... the methodology and report writing itself is too complex: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/deep-dive-...