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Comment by ttr2021 | Hacker News Reader

ttr2021

Yet another 'digital container' of disparate information to house your data and make it difficult for someone find it across an organisation.

As someone who was working in a scale up I found that we had information spread across coda, wiki, markdown, tickets, collaborative whiteboards (Miro), git issues, google docs, coda, (insert random lastest cool SaaS that someone stumbled across one night and used the company card to sign up), local spreadsheets and docs.

Every individual, every team, had their own place for stuff and it was a nightmare trying to find things, let alone the security nightmare of understanding which data was where and what sensitivity it was.

It just seems like it's not the tool itself, it's more there are actually too many options out there

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It's not about the options, but the reward.

What's the reward for creating good documentation? That's now describes the upper bound of time and effort people are willing to put in.

Since there is no reward, people will put in the absolute minimum they need to and that's rational behavior.

But also "what is documentation?" You can have great customer-facing-product-docs and keep them up to date. You can have an internal process wiki that is mostely up to date. But what about the conversation over lunch/slack to change a product feature, that then becomes a story card, that gets mockup, that gets notes in the pr and comments in the code, that get ad-hoc slack conversations clarifying details. How many micro-decisions where made in that process? How many those _should_ be documented vs tossed away?

Long ago Mozilla started making all such decisions on mailing lists, because the meetings at water coolers never get documented, and because you can't meet a colleague who lives 10,000 miles away over a water cooler (or at least not very often).

Interestingly enough, fully-remote companies have an advantage here - such "water-cooler" discussions and decisions still happen, but more commonly over Slack and email than in person (and even in-person discussions can be recorded, although few people think of that in advance).

That’s very true. Although I don’t personally count Slack as a good documentation system, at least you can copy from it.

> It just seems like it's not the tool itself, it's more there are actually too many options out there

And that's exactly why every company is building their own version of such a tool. They all want to be the "one place" where all information is stored.

Don’t make me tap the sign*

*the sign: https://m.xkcd.com/927/

Interestingly enough, it seems that information living across so many different tools has become enough of a problem that startups are trying to tackle that issue.

Glean (https://www.glean.com/) for example is building a "Google for work"

Its a pity google stopped selling their search appliances

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