[bsder]

It's not about the options, but the reward.

What's the reward for creating good documentation? That's now describes the upper bound of time and effort people are willing to put in.

Since there is no reward, people will put in the absolute minimum they need to and that's rational behavior.

[jacobr1]

But also "what is documentation?" You can have great customer-facing-product-docs and keep them up to date. You can have an internal process wiki that is mostely up to date. But what about the conversation over lunch/slack to change a product feature, that then becomes a story card, that gets mockup, that gets notes in the pr and comments in the code, that get ad-hoc slack conversations clarifying details. How many micro-decisions where made in that process? How many those _should_ be documented vs tossed away?

[db48x]

Long ago Mozilla started making all such decisions on mailing lists, because the meetings at water coolers never get documented, and because you can't meet a colleague who lives 10,000 miles away over a water cooler (or at least not very often).

[BerislavLopac]

Interestingly enough, fully-remote companies have an advantage here - such "water-cooler" discussions and decisions still happen, but more commonly over Slack and email than in person (and even in-person discussions can be recorded, although few people think of that in advance).

[db48x]

That’s very true. Although I don’t personally count Slack as a good documentation system, at least you can copy from it.