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Docs become stale and untrusted. Theres a tech solution waiting to be made that orients docs around time instead of hierarchy or tags. Kind of like how a commit tells you something was true at a certain time and in a certain context.

But I also agree with other commenters that culture is a huge part of this.

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Yours is probably the comment that most resonates with me. The whole thing with team documentation is that you're asking the employees to do something most of them don't want to do, which is make every development or devops task take longer. You have to retrain them to think "okay I just changed something. do I also have to update documentation?" and then, if the answer is "yes", they have to actually go and update the documentation. It's clearly not impossible but it's a big change for many devs and, in my experience, the result is exactly what you describe: stale docs which are therefore untrusted. Maybe one motivated leader will try to be the hero and maintain the docs, but that just makes everyone else even lazier (I don't think about the docs, Joe handles that) and eventually he/she will give up or leave.

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