[euroderf]

> The nice side effect is the author taking 10x more time to save 10x L+1 and L+2 leaders (ie more expensive people) from spending that same time trying to understand it.

IMHO this is analogous to most of the economic justification for not being sucky at documentation. When you apply this analysis to the user-facing side, an hour of documentation can save hundreds of hours of user thrashing.

This is something that I would assume is intuitive, but under the capitalist mode of software development, it seems to be an uphill fight to get the economic rationale into management's heads. There are of course exceptions, and they stand out in excellence.

When you shortchange documentation, you're externalizing costs that shared efficiencies say should be internalized. Kind of like dumping sewage in the lake, or driving on leaded gas.