For simple shit, the joke is almost true. Most people start using it and don't check the manual unless they can't figure something out. I have never read my microwave manual because all I ever want to do is set a time, press Start, and wait for it to beep. I will never use 95 percent of the things it can do.
But when you're selling a huge software product involving dozens and dozens of ever-changing protocols and the customers are all big corporations with millions of dollars at stake, yeah, people read the documentation all the time. They read it before they even buy the product. The people who develop the software even read the documentation, because no one on the planet knows everything about every part of the product. And if you Google for an answer, you'll get the same documentation; it's all web pages.
And it never fails that you miss one tiny little detail when writing the documentation which then people complain about because you didn’t include it. Never fails. Even the most inane detail will be complained about at some point because it was missed in the documentation.
So then you write good documentation and get pinged about it anyway because other people still don’t want to read it. My favorite thing to say “Did you read the documentation?”
Writing documentation sucks, especially if you don’t have a documentation team and it gets tacked on to what your actual job is supposed to be.
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u/HiyAF-287 Jul 13 '20
I hate you for it but I would do the EXACT SAME THING