[dewey]

At the beginning of my career I always thought it would be amazing to have complete documentation and extensive onboarding guides. Over the years I've realized that every attempt at documentation failed and always gets out of sync too quickly. Especially as you'd have to update documentation you don't even know existed if you change some behavior that is also used / documented in other places by another team.

People sometimes don't agree and say "Chat isn't documentation", but being good at Slack search and sharing information on Slack with the right keywords (function names, column names etc.) is a super power. It always allows me to track down why a decision has been made or find the right people with context on a particular topic faster and more efficient than any documentation would ever do.

Metrics, GitHub search, Slack search, Source code comments are way more valuable than any documentation that will almost all the time be outdated in some parts. I believe that people who can work with that and know how to get information themselves vs. needing everything to be neatly summarized or collected for them in onboarding guides are the ones you want in your team.