The author mentions documentation as an example of dirty work that you could grind as a way to "build your career". Personally I enjoy writing documentation and I make an effort to write documentation in every project I work in, and I'm yet to see a single project where that work would have been valued. Nobody cares if you write great documentation. It's not a way to "build your career". I stopped reading the article at this point.
I have had the opposite experience. At every job I've had other than the first I've been praised for my documentation and it has opened up many opportunities for me.
The biggest piece of advice I can give is keep it short and put more important information up front. Every doc should start with a one-sentence plain language description of the thing's purpose and context.
Pascal once wrote in apology "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter". Be exactly as detailed as necessary and no longer.
I agree that overall, documentation is not a "career building" activity, but there are certainly some notable exceptions where the documentation is so good that people rave about it. A few that come to mind:
* The Bash manpage [1]
* FreeBSD docs, in general — the "base system" implementation and
documentation go hand-in-hand. If there's missing docs for a
built-in tool, that's treated as a bug.
* SQLite's documentation of the SQL language syntax [2]
[1] https://linux.die.net/man/1/bash
[2] https://www.sqlite.org/lang_select.html
> these are great places to look for high impact opportunities
I didn’t read the article so much as saying to grind through the dirty work, but to look at the existence of dirty work as a chance to (a) fix someone’s pain, preferably a lot of someones, (b) level-up your organization’s abilities in an area. At a job in the early 00s we had zero developer-facing documentation, so everything was an oral history project… this was awful, especially after we turned over a bunch of eng staff. I set up a couple of very simple systems for docs, and - this is the part that is the grind - started writing stuff down every time I had to answer a question from a coworker. It didn’t take long before I was mostly just pointing people to the doc system, and then eventually other people started adding to it. At that point it snowballs and basically the doc problem is “solved”. (There’s still work, but there’s a system in place that reduces the overall effort required.)
I don’t really disagree with you that docs are sometimes just a thankless grind, but I think the point is to find something that is dirty work but also has a really high and visible impact.
When you read someone's personal account of their career, and it doesn't match your experience, your response is to stop reading it? Wouldn't you want to keep reading to see why your experience and their experience are so different?
It depends, if it's a documentation read by many (e.g. an engineering standard), then it might boost your career ("everybody heard of baobabKoodaa!"). But in general, it's as you say.
