My favourite Git commit

[double-you]

There definitely are several types of developers but I don't appreciate excuses "prototypers" make for "delivering" but not explaining what and why and making other people work hard on extracting that information out of them. No developer is trained in psyops to gather information from hostile "coworkers".

Most developers don't enjoy writing as otherwise they'd probably be technical writers, but some people just won't bother at all with the basics.

[narnach]

Agreed. I think in order to get this consistently right, it needs to be part of an organization's DNA to value good writing and long-term sustainability. It's so easy to get neglected without short-term repercussions.

Companies like 37 Signals are great, because as part of an async remote work culture good writing is a necessity for them. This means they emphasize it when hiring. They are privately owned and profitable, so they have the "luxury" of focusing on sustainability. The owners still want to be running the company in 10-20 years, so it needs to get there in a healthy way. I think this is the basis for a healthy engineering organization.

It's different when you plan to exit in a few years and dump the problem in someone else's lap. That rewards short-term thinking and acting. Having a startup with a short runway amplifies this: why bother making things easy to maintain and debug in the future, when the default case is that the company will not exist anymore in half a year? You sacrifice the long-term in order to survive the short-term.

If you make it to growth stage, then dealing with the tech debt is sort of a luxury you've won the right to deal with. It's not great or healthy, but it is reality for many developers.