[markrages]

Sometimes I get the feeling that many developers are functionally illiterate. (In the https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/11/cannot-read/ sense.)

I can spend as much time as I like writing comments or design documentation or whitepapers or commit messages, but nobody reads it. Maybe they will set up a meeting for me to read it to them.

[justin_oaks]

That's probably about right. But it's not isolated to developers. Most people skim or skip most instructions, documentation, warnings, etc.

When I write documentation I hope that people will never talk to me because the information they need is already written down. But more often it's so I can redirect them to the documentation and implicitly require that they read it before they continue to talk to me. In other words, documentation doesn't usually prevent an interruption as much as it minimizes the interruption.