[choeger]

Documentation sucks because nothing is used very often anymore. In the good old days (TM), software was used for much longer in pretty much the same shape. Think of GNU coreutils.

In contrast, your API or your frontend code or your Amazon Lambda or your Microservice is quite likely not feature-complete, does some things that should be handled by a different component and was developed with exactly one use case in mind until it was "good enough". Thanks to scrum, no one cares about completeness, orthogonal design, or composition of smaller parts anymore. Hence documentation has only token value. Except, maybe, for end user documentation, but I am yet to encounter a "user story" that begins with "As a user, I want to do X, read how to do X in the documentation, follow the instructions and get the desired results."

[jimduk]

Agreed, and I would add pre-web well authored Microsoft help files/ hypertext were often really valuable and could be very well done. Also you could build them after the software was done, or before, as the spec in progress. Think msft help was one of the unsung heroes of their success. But if you have changing software Google/SO is much faster. (Disclaimer, used to work on 'performance support' systems late 90s, one of the points of focus was how do you help users keep improving their combined tool use, team performance and business understanding)