I get that. I used to be able to overhaul a VW beetle on the side of the road with regular tools. A couple of years ago my car's transmission's computer went out on the interstate. I couldn't even get a useful error code. The shop down the street didn't have a high enough end device to talk to it. While the dealer was able to figure it out; it took nearly a month to get the replacement part. I'm car semi-literate.

I also worked at a university and that was concerning because some students would just give up whenever anything didn't go right the first time. No troubleshooting skills at all. We were moving from Google to MS and they needed to use Takeout to backup their stuff locally, just in case something happened. But we got a lot of calls because it wasn't ready to download immediately. I've heard it's gotten worse.

I can make How-to's that can assume they had gone through at least one of the tutorials, but even then I put links to the appropriate tutorials so they could refresh or learn if they needed it.

But lately it seems like people are getting more computer illiterate. So how low do you go? I am getting tempted to add a link to some basic computer literacy.

It's kinda like people complaining about Space Launch System, why aren't we using Saturn V or an improved version of it. We have the blueprints and schematics and everything but it appears there's a gap between what's written down there and what's in the textbooks. A lot of in-between experience has evaporated because shop classes and manufacturing were shut down.

I am realizing that a lot of experience was never written down and turned into institutional knowledge that could be used later. The AI companies would love this but it's gone because it was more cost-effective not to.

Some people are actively trying to sabotage the school system because the uneducated are easy to manipulate.

Any effort to change schooling needs to take those things into account.

When I was in tech support I wrote down the solutions to tickets, it took training the other support techs to read the knowledge base. It took 6 months but support call duration dropped 40%.

It also took training to get customers to read the knowledge base. That reduced calls by 60%.

Documentation has been disregarded by management since the 70s. Now suddenly it's important and its costing them a lot to try to play catchup.

Though I did notice last week lots of unique ads for a while. They were wildly inappropriate to me. It was actually funny to get ads for wheat seed by the ton (I don't live in a wheat compatible location), followed by private plane time-share(don't travel that much). How those are supposed to go together stump me.

Some things that I have learned from of them:

Write for yourself first and get to the end. Rewrite to add in all those things you didn't put in the right place the first time.

Speak at least the dialogue out loud. Spread the description around.

Read some of the worst to remind you that even they got published. Copy the greats for practice on dialogue, or description or whatever you want to work on as deliberate practice.

Try different things like write your story as a game, or a puppet play, or stage play, or screenplay, or radio play. Draw a storyboard or animatic. Go to the park and write what you see. Have your characters in a room together and eat a pie.

What do you do when you have nothing else to do? I know that's really hard these days with all the distractions we have. So maybe what do you watch or read about? What are your interests?

But the world changes. I started out as an engineer and that got shipped to China. I pivoted to IT, shipped to India. Pivoted to technical writing and now there's LLMs.

I figure things out and share to make it easier for others too. That works in a lot of industries.

In my case right now, our users are civil engineers, they just want to be able to use our software to model the environment. They really don't want to become an expert programmer on top of that.

They just want to be able to build their thing, like a bridge, so they can make money, and plug numbers into our software to do that.

It's like making a hammer, the documentation needed for forging a hammer out of steel will be radically different from using the hammer to build a house or doing ortho surgery.

There are 2 kinds of documentation: how to make something and how to use something. They are very different. When you are making something you need to document what it is supposed to do (because the code tells us what it does and bugs are when it does something incorrect). You also need to document why you decided to do it that way so when you go back in 6 months you can pick up more easily. When you are making user docs you need to think like a user, mainly assuming they never used it before, and they just want to get that task done so they can do all the other tasks they have to do. Documentation is customer facing because when docs work, customers learn to trust you.

I create documentation that builds trust and help customers use the product successfully. I reduced tech support calls by 60% and increased support website lists by 40%.

We only recently figured out how to reproduce Roman concrete.

We’d have more but a lot were blown up during WWII.

I've been places where devs have no idea what the product-as a whole-does. They just work on the feature of the sprint and throw the code over the wall. Their testing consists of if: it compiled==it passed. They have no idea how to even start actually testing if it's not on the happy path.

I been in places where the code accomplished the spec, but in the most lazy way possible so it appeared to work but was useless outside of what the tests looked for.

I knew one QA guy that was amazing but was so overloaded because management kept hiring "cheap" QA that were actively making his life worse.

I'm a tech writer right now at a tech company and a dev just sent over an LLM generated "doc" that's referring to things that don't exist.

Neither management nor dev has learned anything from Therac-25. QA is hard.

This guy was doing at least 3 people's jobs even before the first emergency occurred.

Then it was an inevitable cascade failure situation. It was never his fault.

Management failed here. If its stupid but it works, its not stupid, is the old saying, but the reality I've seen is its still stupid but you got lucky. -Maxim 43

The luck finally ran out.