Why do software engineers hate writing documentation?

Posted by Stewart Johnson on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Stewart Johnson
Published on 2008-10-25T14:31:03Z Indexed on 2010/04/13 23:13 UTC
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documentation

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I ask because I quite enjoy it! I'm talking about design documentation and implementation notes (NOT user manuals), which are non-existent in most of the codebases I've been handed. I can understand why a developer wouldn't want to write requirements (that's the analyst's job) or the user documentation (that's a technical writer's job) but I don't get why developers hate writing design docs.

I don't think I would feel as if I'd finished the job if I only wrote the code and walked away -- mainly because when I've been introduced to code-only situations I've seen how hard it is to figure out what's been done and what the software does. I would hate for people to suffer the same situation when inheriting my code.

What makes you loath writing supporting documentation for your code?

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