Re: Article: "Living Documentation"

[Jeff Hanvey <jewahe -at- lycos -dot- co -dot- uk>]

On Fri, 4 Apr 2003 15:06:42 -0800 (PST), Andrew Plato:

It's not that I'm necessarily attacking you, but that I'm attacking your 
stubborn insistance that all of us are just inept, stupid hacks out there 
ruining documentation by worrying more about fonts, templates, and grammar 
than actually developing content. That's simply not true - and I think this 
list tends to highlights those things simply because those are the things 
that we most have in common.

It simply irks me that you put forth the attitude, at least on list, that  
*all* tech writers aren't professional, because they don't take 
responsibility for mistakes. Your experiences may have proven this out, but 
mine have not. Every writer - every worker I've been around has been more 
than willing to determine what went wrong and what can be done to avoid 
that problem in the future. Those who played blame games and weren't 
productive didn't stay very long. Maybe that's just the luck of my draw, 
but I've never been a place where people played more than they worked - 
I've always  been around professional people who took their jobs seriously 
(okay, so that wasn't true of my high school and grad school Pizza Hut 
days).

What I find most often in your attitude is a disconnect between the real 
world and your world. You work in an environment where you *can* control 
every bit of the process and ther results. For those who own their own 
business or do consulting work, they pretty much get to make their own 
rules and work within their own guidelines to produce the finished product.

However, most of us DON'T. We work in an environment where we have to do 
what other people tell us to do, where we have to shunt aside our personal 
feelings and biases and do the job the way we're told to do.

Many of us who work in that real world deal with an environment where 
communication is not a priority, and where people have carved their own 
little territories and feel that letting people into that territory is 
going to carve into their power base. I deal with this all the time - there 
are programmers in my own company who for their very lives have no idea why 
things are *not* self evident and who treat even the simplest question like 
it is the most ridiculous thing they've every heard. And I don't bother 
them with questions - I take the time to delve into the source code, to 
read whatever I can, to get my hands on the software. I only ask the 
question when I've exhausted all my sources.

To the point to technical knowledge, it never seems to occur to you that it 
really isn't the training and certifications that are important, but the 
person's willingness to *continue* training, to take the impetus and get 
his hands dirty. Every technical person I know has not learned much out of 
books, but from having contact with the real thing - and from dealing with 
real-world situations.