Documentation fulfills five important functions:
- Communications to management about the progress of
the project, providing intermediate product
visibility
- Task-to-task communication
- Instruction and reference
- Quality assurance support
- Historical reference
The biggest thing I'm missing from this nice little diagram is that in order to do documentation properly, you need people dedicated to it. That is, writers.
I'm very against this. You need resources allocated, that is developer time. I experienced having dedicated doc writers in FAANG and I wasn't happy with the experience. Our docs were mostly shit and for anything remotely specialized it was the developers who had to write the docs in the end. They were mostly proofreading or writing some non technical blog posts. It felt like they were an excuse for not forcing the developers to write proper docs themselves, and in the end no one wrote the technical docs most of the time.
So your argument against technical writers is that you've had bad experiences with FAANG technical writers? And you think developers always have the time and skill for writing proper documentation? I wish that was true.
For certain types of documentation you need technical technical writers - for example, see http://hackwrite.com/posts/enough-to-be-dangerous/. And you need a proper content strategy / information architecture in place. Blame your recruiting managers and whoever wrote the job descriptions for not thinking about that.
Edit: And of course you need to allocate developer time. It's called knowledge transfer.
