*getting onboarded into software dev* ok so where's the team librarian and how do I file questions with them
wait what do you mean "there isn't one" I thought we were building complex systems at scale with safety and reliability in mind
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in reply to @NireBryce's post:
everyone wants docs, nobody wants to give time to write docs that are useful for a team. so everyone just keeps their own private stream of conciousness text files that only make sense to them
i think in concept a lot of people do want to give time for this, but the want gets overwritten by "hmm but i have this very important thing that needs to be done now"
right, but for the team to outlive itself you need to actually codify the position, which no one does. The absence of it is felt in every single piece of software that lives past it's first year.
corps have no excuse because it'd boost the productivity for the same number of salary hours, but you can't pretend PIPs are real coerce your employees to always be in War Emergency Power if you can't use fake metrics. so it never happens.
Also “ability to write decent documentation” is almost never a skill software companies hire for, so if you do have someone who can do it, it’s basically by chance.
I once interviewed with a company where the interviewer kept talking about their great extensible scheme for organizing information to make it easy for users to find whatever the line of business involved. That got me kind of excited, and I started asking about this scheme and whether that meant (because of course it would mean) that they were hiring library sciences people to do the heavy lifting.
...And the interviewer had no idea what I was going on about. Their super-important universal categorization scheme was to let users tag items and search by tag.
this paper haunts my dreams https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/berrypicking.html
Ah, that explains a lot about Internet history, where people (presumably inspired by this) started talking about "semantic" everything, and then the idea of the interconnectedness fell apart. Thank you!
I got on onboarded into An Actual Serious Engineer Job and the answer was "the librarian retired 20 years ago and the company decided never to replace them. Anyway your first assignment is to familiarize yourself with the antique mediawiki, baroque network drive full of unopenable drawings (you need a piece of proprietary software we only have 2 seat licenses for so if you need it just email one of those guys to make you a PDF), three OneNote instances, and Microsoft Exchange Folder we use to keep our post-millenium docs." There is even a library, shoved in a back closet, it's just disorganized and stops in 2000. So it's not just software dev: the Powers That Be have consistently shot themselves in the foot on this one.