Those were the halcyon days of technical writing teams sitting alongside developers. Extremely rare to see that now, and the organizational sclerosis from it is obvious from the vantage point where I sit.
You can immediately tell the really good technical documentation written in that old school pattern by its usefulness when you don't know anything about the code being documented. Because the good technical editors bring to the table a discipline and enforcement of a judicious eye for perspective, constantly, maddeningly, repeatedly, asking ELI5 until the words coalesce into something I can appreciate as a newbie to its tech stack.
If you want to see the documentation rot really set into the commercial industry (the situation is better in the bigger open source projects), look for documentation between versions. A common commercial software dodge now is the documentation site has a way to switch between versions of the same topic, and the budget for technical writers being non-existent, someone makes the decision to "helpfully suggest" there isn't an "exact match" for the same topic in the other selected version, and would the user like to change to the homepage of the selected version?
Product owners have forgotten that well-edited and written documentation integrated into the support and development lifecycle is an enormously powerful vendor lock-in.
You can immediately tell the really good technical documentation written in that old school pattern by its usefulness when you don't know anything about the code being documented. Because the good technical editors bring to the table a discipline and enforcement of a judicious eye for perspective, constantly, maddeningly, repeatedly, asking ELI5 until the words coalesce into something I can appreciate as a newbie to its tech stack.
If you want to see the documentation rot really set into the commercial industry (the situation is better in the bigger open source projects), look for documentation between versions. A common commercial software dodge now is the documentation site has a way to switch between versions of the same topic, and the budget for technical writers being non-existent, someone makes the decision to "helpfully suggest" there isn't an "exact match" for the same topic in the other selected version, and would the user like to change to the homepage of the selected version?
Product owners have forgotten that well-edited and written documentation integrated into the support and development lifecycle is an enormously powerful vendor lock-in.