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.
relatable AF
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.
No way! This literally me right now.
Oh god I can feel this energy
Catch ’em early, train ’em right.
I got a qa internship and was ecstatic that I didn’t have to do factory work anymore.
First good meme in this sub
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.
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.
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.
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.