[namdnay]

My experience is that for internal documentation the time spent explaining things to a technical writer is bigger than the time spent writing the documentation

This isn’t the case for external documentation, that has to be more polished, needs sign offs and images and demos and stuff - tech writers can come in useful here

[pmoriarty]

Most developers just don't like writing docs, are too busy to write them, and aren't very good writers anyway.

So even on those rare occasions when they do actually document something, the documentation tends to be pretty bare-bones and not very readable.

Good technical writers are worth their weight in gold.

[bazmattaz]

Having worked with software engineers for the last 10years I can confirm, most don’t like documentation. At least 80% dont

[still_grokking]

Which is a funny statement as almost all devs like to have documentation.

[nmfisher]

If I'm simply consuming a library, I find most real-world documentation to be pretty superfluous. A full working example is usually enough to understand how things fit together.

If I'm working on a library, design docs and commented code is nice though.

[dividefuel]

It may take more time to explain it to a tech writer than it would for you to write it, but in most cases the final docs written by a tech writer will be much better.

[euroderf]

The tech writer's output will be a Force Multiplier.