# The state of technical documentation in the industry

Why does nobody on the internet talk about how terrible documentation is in the tech industry? It feels like the moment a product becomes dominant in its space, its developers stop caring about documentation altogether. People need to use their product in their jobs, so users have no choice. They just have to figure things out themselves.

For someone new to a technology, that can be almost impossible. And I think that’s probably one of the reasons why there are so many courses for every technology nowadays. You can no longer learn something properly just by reading the documentation. You can’t figure things out on your own anymore. And if you’re trying to learn a technology and understand what it’s actually capable of, forget about getting the full picture from the documentation. It just doesn’t work. You have to take a course and pay someone to teach you, because the documentation simply doesn’t answer those questions anymore.

Even documentation that is considered “good” by the industry can be torture for someone who is trying to understand a new technology. It’s torture.

This year, I took certification exams for Terraform and AWS Solutions Architect, and I’m currently preparing for the CKA. I had some experience with these technologies at work but I wanted to fill the gaps in my practical experience and earn some credibility.

Let’s start with the simplest one: Terraform. When I was preparing for the exam, I started with their official technical documentation and tutorials to understand what the technology had to offer and how things worked to fill the gaps I have in my working experience. After that, I decided to take a practice exam, and my score was very low. I didn’t have any idea about half of the questions.

It turned out that the documentation simply didn’t cover the things they expected you to know for the exam. I was only able to cover those topics after taking additional courses and more practice exams, figuring out what exactly they were testing and then studying those specific areas.

I had exactly the same experience with AWS. And yet people say that AWS documentation is much better than other cloud providers’ documentation. It honestly scares me to imagine what the documentation is like with the other clouds.

And it’s the same with Kubernetes. Its documentation is considered good. People constantly talk about how good the Kubernetes documentation is. But, for example, if I don’t understand a particular concept, say APIs, I go to the API section and I’m immediately presented with a list of APIs. There’s no basic explanation of how the API works, no link to an explanation, and no indication of where my particular object fits into all of this.

And it’s like this everywhere.

I think this is one of the reasons why technology education has become such a huge business. You simply can’t understand things from the documentation anymore because nobody seems to care about making it actually understandable.

Now we have AI, which is supposed to read and explain all of this for us, but it makes mistakes and is incredibly bad when it comes to a new or rarely used feature, so we’re not supposed to trust it and have to double-check everything. Which means even more mental load.

In the early days of tech, it was relatively easy to understand a new feature with documentation or a book. Later on, it became even simpler because you could always find some blogger who had written an article or recorded a video, explaining everything in human terms and telling you what you actually needed to know.

Now blogging is being slowly killed by AI. People are gradually losing the motivation to write anything at all. The only credible source we are left with is technical documentation and, maybe, some courses.

So how is all of this going to work in the future?