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I’ve been at it 18 years for different organisations and my experience and strategy is the same as yours.

No one bothers to read/understand anything until the very last minute, then they realise “oh shit this won’t work in this scenario, and it’s always a showstopper”…

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But what about my impression that it is getting worse? When I (as a developer) was trying to help customers with the product 20 years ago, about 50% (my guesstimate) of the people were actually reading what I wrote, at least to a good degree. These days I am lucky if it is 20% who are reading answers to their problems more than in a completely superficial way. I blame social media and smartphones.

I think the quality of comms is definitely getting worse, I work for myself now and I am very selective of clients now. So I don’t butt heads against it as much, but it still happens despite best efforts, especially when people move on or even go on vacation.

Literacy skills have been falling and it shows up in testing of a lot of different countries, and it basically lines up with the arrival of iPhone/Android(or real smart phones).

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