[kaycebasques]

The intro touches on something I learned to be true very early in my technical writing career, but which isn't discussed much and may not be widely known:

> helping to push forward all sorts of efforts around knowledge-sharing at Jane Street

As a TW I often find myself advocating for more scalable/sustainable/permanent ways to store institutional knowledge. The classic example is email. Sometimes there is extremely useful knowledge buried in an email thread. I often work with engineers (or whoever) to turn that knowledge into publicly searchable documentation.

P.S. tangentially related to the title of this post, my brother came up with a fun self-deprecating joke (which I later used on as a tagline [1])

> Technically, I'm a writer

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome/

[nicbou]

Same. Unless you make it your personal responsibility, it won't get done. Documentation is hard, and not everyone's definition of fun. It's especially hard to explain things you are intimately familiar with to your colleagues.

I've done that for long enough to be very good at it. Now I earn my living from documenting stuff the local government doesn't document property.

[macintux]

Every company I work for struggles with knowledge capture/sharing, and it’s always a priority, but never really prioritized. Tough nut to crack.

[polote]

It is especially true because it is much faster to write an email than to create a piece of documentation. Even more because of the state of corporate knowledge sharing tools.

But yeah at the end of the day, there is no easy fix, it has to be in the core list of responsibilities of each job to work at the company scale

[Zababa]

At my day job, they delete email after 180 days. I often wonder how much time has been lost recreating information that was deleted that way.

[tudelo]

And how much money might have been saved not having some of that information available later... because that is totally a good reason to burn history.

[radlad]

This happened at my last company, but with Slack. It was a real pain at times.

[dSebastien]

So true.

People don't realize and/or don't care much about all the information that gets lost in e-mail.

I've been struggling for years to push people to document stuff. Often I'm the only one who writes page after page, and send links to docs, until there are hundreds. At that point, others usually start to chime in a bit.