Comment No one should document their own work! (Score 1) 211
As a professional technical writer, published author, and university instructor, I can tell everyone here that developers should never be permitted to write their own documentation. No amount of blogging and helpful hints is going to turn a programmer into a teacher, unless she already is both. Even then, there is a huge potential for disaster. The person who creates something should never, ever be the person who documents it. The creator is just too close to the product. Zen mind is beginner's mind. This is why UX focus groups consist of naive users, not experts. And the developers are the most expert of all possible experts. Sadly, software companies, at least in the digital content creation sector, seem to have fired all of the technical writers as a cost-cutting measure. The quality of documentation from many companies (I'm looking at you, Adobe) has plummeted. Nowadays it's expected that any issues with the docs will be resolved by the users themselves via discussion forums. It's a travesty, I tell you.