Why you should centralize your documentation.
Gary is a promising young developer who has just hired on at a new company. He gets his new laptop, a welcome packet, and a tour around the building.
When he finally makes it to his desk, he is asked to join the daily standup, then a team meeting, and then a code review session.
He’s feeling a little overwhelmed.
After lunch he has some free time to set up his new laptop.
He opens it, fires it up, connects to the network, and gets Slack and email working
.
..
…
Now what?
His welcome information didn’t lead past this point.
He pings his manager and asks what tools he should use.
He is directed to the tech lead, who is currently in a meeting.
He reaches out to another coworker who tells him to install an assortment of seemingly random tools.
Not wanting to be a bother, Gary thanks him and gets to work installing all the software he was told.
He goes out to the internet and starts downloading.
But how does everything work together? What projects is he responsible for? Is there a contributors guide? Style guide? Best practices?
Anything?!?!?
No.
Our friend Gary is stuck in the dark. Left to spin his wheels and try to stay out of everyone else’s way.
Poor Gary.
If only he could have been directed to documentation that clearly outlined:
- the projects he should clone
- what the preferred IDE was
- what local development tools he would need
- who was responsible for each part of the app
- opinionated tech stack documentation
Don’t let your new hires be like Gary.
Have a centralized documentation solution.
A place where everyone can easily search out information.
It would have been so easy if Gary’s coworker could have just pointed him to internal-docs.yourcompany.net.
Gary could have had a huge head start on his first day, week, month(s).
Best,
Andre