All technology, proportional to the details necessary to operate or service it, requires some form of written language to indicate how to use it.
Technical documentation can be extremely difficult from how advanced the writing has to be, but it’s absolutely crucial relative to several factors:
- How bad things will get if the thing stops working.
- The scarcity of alternative approaches that don’t use that particular piece of technology.
Whenever the design of the interface/hardware doesn’t communicate the concept explicitly (which is extremely common), the user needs the software engineer to communicate exactly what the user can do and precisely how to do it.
For this reason, technical people need to understand how to write well or get assistance from others who are skilled at it.
The absence of good technical writing sabotages the entire community around the product:
- Other technical people who have to work on the project will spend countless hours of rework just to figure out what the original creator did.
- Non-technical people in positions of leadership and decision-making will have trouble knowing exactly what to do in many situations, which means they won’t be as willing to support advantageous decisions for that project, such as extra funding.
- Non-technical people outside of the project won’t be as quick to adopt the product, especially when it’s an open-source project.