[austincheney]

Yes and no. I have seen major disparities on this matter within different large employers. It’s a matter of expectation differences attributed to populations.

Many times the factors involved are discriminatory starting at hiring time. Such factors may include graduate education, independent research/writing, invention or original solution creation. These people are more inclined to write and diagram, because they have prior practice doing so. The inclination to write is a behavior predicated upon that prior practice.

The larger population of software developers are not so inclined to write. There is no uniform foundation to define an acceptable baseline of qualification to practice writing software professionally. That means the distribution of competence is highly variable and not well measured. In case of poor structuring there is maximal opportunity for selection bias in candidate entry, which suggests preferential factors for candidate selection not aligned with performance (however that’s defined).

In economics this is called the blind leading the blind. Not only is the greater population not guaranteed to be competent but selection preferences reenforce that candidates are selected away from competence towards a medium distribution like that of a bell curve. If you are in this population, as most of us are, you must work harder to write and document anything only for much of it to be ignored.