Because most people who develop these things are, frankly, terrible at good documentation, or understanding the end-user perspective.
There's also a downward spiral effect when you start getting into these things, because lots of them require dependencies, or ask you to do things but don't explain why, and you're just left wondering why you added that line to a config file somewhere, but if you don't put it there, nothing works.
A vertical slice of the amount of knowledge you need passes through so many different disciplines, operating systems, GUIs, and programming languages that it would look like a Milhojas cake.
I've been a technical writer in the software industry for 17 years. The number one challenge in my work is extracting all of the information I need to write good documentation from the experts elsewhere in my company.
Because most people who develop these things are, frankly, terrible at good documentation, or understanding the end-user perspective.
There's also a downward spiral effect when you start getting into these things, because lots of them require dependencies, or ask you to do things but don't explain why, and you're just left wondering why you added that line to a config file somewhere, but if you don't put it there, nothing works.
A vertical slice of the amount of knowledge you need passes through so many different disciplines, operating systems, GUIs, and programming languages that it would look like a Milhojas cake.
I've been a technical writer in the software industry for 17 years. The number one challenge in my work is extracting all of the information I need to write good documentation from the experts elsewhere in my company.