[rqtwteye]

I work in medical devices so we have to write a lot of docs. But they all disappear in document management systems where you can't find anything if you don't already know where it is. Are there no document management systems that are actually useful?

[wpietri]

Ask yourself how many document management systems are selected after rigorous tests of actual usage vs those selected after sales presentations and schmoozing. That should give you your answer.

And if that's ambiguous, then ask how often your company penalizes people for making the common but wrong choice versus the uncommon but wrong choice.

[rqtwteye]

This applies to pretty much all enterprise software. It’s rarely selected by or for the benefit of the actual users. Usually it’s selected for the benefit of management (for example reporting) or for friends of management.

[yamtaddle]

A good secretary (or a bunch of them) and filing cabinets.

You may still not know how to find anything, but they will.

Like a lot of other things, this has suffered from computerization making it yet another small part of everyone's job (which also increases context switching, the amount of shit you need to know and keep track of, and generally makes jobs more stressful) rather than a specialty that's the main focus of a few workers.

The benefit (get to stop paying some employees) is easy to measure, while the harm is not.

[rqtwteye]

"Like a lot of other things, this has suffered from computerization making it yet another small part of everyone's job (which also increases context switching, the amount of shit you need to know and keep track of, and generally makes jobs more stressful) rather than a specialty that's the main focus of a few workers."

Nicely said. I am getting really stressed out how complex things are becoming. It's already hard to keep up with git, Jira, Bitbucket, AWS, k8s, Helm, JS frameworks, databases and whatsoever. But then add hard to use document management systems and f...ed up processes that are mainly designed for management to get nice reports and not for productivity. Now you are a bad developer and you are a bad document management person because it's simply impossible to be good at all this stuff.

I am constantly preaching to management that we need specialized tech writers and specialized devs that are good at their respective. But I guess it looks cheaper to waste time and energy of engineers on stuff they aren't good at.

[contingencies]

git works for us across business/electronics/electrical/mechanical/software.

The exception is daily supply chain and accounting, which due to factors like urgency, multiple stakeholders per order, high pace of handover, external system integration, multilingual presentation requirements and nontechnical users we prefer a dedicated web based system with more of a real time focus with event hooks (eg. notification, translation, verification).

[rqtwteye]

What kind of docs do you have in git? Git doesn’t work well with binary file formats like Word, Excel or Visio. You can do it but the diff won’t work.

[contingencies]

Markdown + .webp, mostly. Some 'TeX.