What's needed is something more like peer review, where the "tech writer's" job is to ask hard question from the user POV during development - for varying values of "user", which would include customer, API consumer, and so on.
This wouldn't be code review, because it's about features, interfaces, and expected behaviours, not the fine details of implementation. And it wouldn't be a PM job, because it would be peer feedback in the form of dialog, not management in the form of requirements and specs.
And it should be continuous, so the doc base evolves in parallel with the code base.
And it should not be an afterthought.
This job does not exist yet. And it should, because virtually all orgs have a problem where individual developers become repositories of The Important Knowledge. If they leave it becomes hard to characterise system behaviours and architectures well enough to understand how they work well enough to replace/improve/reverse engineer them.
So IMO there's a niche for people who are competent developers, competent listeners, and competent communicators, who can pull it all together, stay on top of changes, and leave a readable record of the current state of institutional knowledge about projects, practices, stacks, and interfaces.
What's needed is something more like peer review, where the "tech writer's" job is to ask hard question from the user POV during development - for varying values of "user", which would include customer, API consumer, and so on.
This wouldn't be code review, because it's about features, interfaces, and expected behaviours, not the fine details of implementation. And it wouldn't be a PM job, because it would be peer feedback in the form of dialog, not management in the form of requirements and specs.
And it should be continuous, so the doc base evolves in parallel with the code base.
And it should not be an afterthought.
This job does not exist yet. And it should, because virtually all orgs have a problem where individual developers become repositories of The Important Knowledge. If they leave it becomes hard to characterise system behaviours and architectures well enough to understand how they work well enough to replace/improve/reverse engineer them.
So IMO there's a niche for people who are competent developers, competent listeners, and competent communicators, who can pull it all together, stay on top of changes, and leave a readable record of the current state of institutional knowledge about projects, practices, stacks, and interfaces.