ProgrammerHumor
techicalWriter
Discussion
For the love of god, or whatever you consider holy, PLEASE just write your own damn documentation. If all if your documentation is written by some intern or someone who doesn’t fully understand the code, you just get shitty documentation, and shitty documentation tends to be much worse than no documentation.
I’m already having flashbacks to the Unreal documentation with “the flurfity variable is the flurfity” -_-
Is that actually part of the docs?
There isn’t a specific “flurfity” variable in unreal (that I’ve seen, at this point I’d hardly be surprised), but there are SO MANY EXAMPLES of “<name that makes no intuitive sense> - is the <name>” in Unreal’s public documentation.
The only way to use Unreal under a public/individual license is to use their forums, which is mostly other people trying to experimentally figure out what stuff does alongside each other, or to work at a company that has the commercial license and can see the source code, so you figure it out and remember for your personal projects.
Admittedly, “the only way” is a bit of an exaggeration, but Unreal makes me unreasonably angry because of this 😅
Good point, make sure you include in that in the documentation
I have never understood the concept of making someone else write documentation than the person who created something.
Either the documentation is worthless because if it is not explained before then how should the other person know how it works, or it takes twice the amount of time as the developer needs to explain it to the documenter anyway.
Ironically, AI, not interns, seems to be the future of documentation for devs that actually give a rats ass about it. My brother (10+ YoE dev) recently discovered how nice running an isolated local AI model is for grunt work like this. According to him, it does a better job at creating summaries than even he can and it takes a fraction of the time.
I hope there is a legitimately workable model that can do that, if not now then soon, but I’m skeptical about its current usefulness given how many times every fork of GPT I’ve used gave inaccurate documentation or general information when I or coworkers tried asking.
The trick is to split it up into chunks. The way LLMs work, the further the data is from the point where it's generating the content, the more likely it is to just decide on the wrong path and then snowball into hallucination. It doesn't think or go back and check the code at the beginning, it's more like relying on the proverbial butterfly wings flapping to create the hurricane in the right place.
If you ask it to summarize a single file or function it'll probably get it correct, if you dump the entire codebase it can tell you some lies. Then you can summarize the summaries. I've seen worse (wrong) hand-generated documentation than what you can get from a decent model.
I’m currently a tech intern. My job is basically to write the documentation and get older projects running locally. I spent over a week on this last one, fixing all sorts of errors, updating the readme to reflect the purpose, writing instructions on how to run the file, and when I finished my boss told me she accidentally gave me a file that is going to be deactivated.
That sounds about right. If it makes you feel better I had the result of the first year of my career thrown away when my manager left and nobody else cared about the project after that. Then I changed jobs and was put on a service that already had a shutdown date so there went the next 8 months.
Yep. I’m just here for the resume builder honestly. Going into my sophomore year of college with 6 months of intern experience at the Mayo Clinic is going to look incredible
relatable AF
No way! This literally me right now.
Oh god I can feel this energy
I got a qa internship and was ecstatic that I didn’t have to do factory work anymore.
First good meme in this sub
Catch ’em early, train ’em right.
I actually enjoy writing documentation. I get me a fancy drink from the coffee shop, dim the lights and fire up a chill playlist. Then proceed to stare at my screen for like 5 hours wondering how dumb the next person who reads this will be. I then make the documentation about two notches dumber to make sure it doesn’t go over anybody’s head. Just when I think I have created the perfect document, a user dumber than I anticipated manages to find the document and pepper me with questions.
Just when you think you have idiot proofed something, the world builds a better idiot.
You guys have interns?
Have not seen any of those in LinkedIn in like ever.
Lies, I've seen them but so little and a lot of time in between. Most ads require juniors for full stack positions with senior experience. Over paid HR.
That wont happen in my team! There is no documentation at all
This reminds me of when a bunch of devs at my workplace told the new hire (first job of his) that he needed to visit HR to ask for the API key so he could use his computer.
Then the QA dude ruined it by saying “actually, you should go ask the CEO!” and it was obvious that it was just a prank.
Imagine it's 2025 and they still use a human for doing the documentation. KEK
Hey! Someone gotta make the prompt!
You're a dick if the only assignments you give to your intern are documentation.
Here’s the onboarding documentation. It was written 7 years ago by a colleague no longer working here. If you find anything incomplete or outdated, please find help and make sure to update all the docs. With your fresh perspective you’re the man for this job! Good luck. Now if you’ll excuse me, that coffee isn’t gonna drink itself
Our interns are on a rotation program and literally had this happen from their last team. Ridiculous
Telling the interns to update the onboarding docs is a most noble tradition and I will not have you sully it.
That said, if nobody's joined the team in over six months or so, then the lead has to go through it before the intern arrives. Otherwise it's unfair.
What do you mean no one joined? Seniors who joined earlier knew better than to touch that.
When I joined my company as a full time employee, I had to update the onboarding docs lmao. My seniors did help me through everything, though. I wasn't left on my own.
My first task when I got my first job as an intern was to translate a 15 year old C++ program into Unity C#. I've never touched unity in my life. There was zero documentation or comments.
Bonus points that the team that worked on that project left the company over a decade ago.
That was my first job, but VB6 instead of C++
Reading this made my blood boil lol cause I had this exact experience especially the "written long ago by someone no longer working here" and the "if you find it outdated, magically get help from people who don't know either or don't have time and update and verify it on your own" oh and I'll keep asking you for an eta every week cause thats the only thing I really do.
They didn’t even have onboarding documentation and now I’m in charge of creating it with everything I learned from being onboarded lol
When I joined my current company, the first task I was assigned was documentation. Thankfully I had an onboarding buddy who took that away from me and gave me interesting tasks from his backlog, while mentoring me. First time in my career I had a senior truly help me, and it was a career defining moment.
Today I'm the senior, and I also keep the newbies away from boring tasks and give support so that they don't burn out and start to slack. They couldn't write any useful docs anyway.
By intern you mean the documentation engineer?
Dude I‘m so glad the company I started at isn‘t like this, they don‘t dump garbage projects on me nor do I have to clean up, I get easy for me to do but still educating and “fun“ projects!
Yeah I judge people who treat interns badly so hard… I also don’t take any interns so I’m basically a huge hypocrite.