Tech can be an unwelcoming place for women, minorities, and early career folks. We know that. What we don't know is we can do something about it. And yes, it involves documentation.
Lack of Women in Leadership
41% of women drop out of tech before they reach the age of 35 (this stat doesn't include career changers). Only 28% of women make it to the c-suite, even though over 60% of women in tech expressed interest in a leadership position. Women are being professionally shunted in tech, which is a meritocracy failure.
How "Being Glue" is Holding Women Back and How Documentation Can Help
We are not talking enough about the dangers of "being glue."
Being glue means doing important but unrecognized work in the office. All of this work moves the needle but does nothing for your annual review. This can include:
- writing tests
- mentoring more junior employees
- event planning
- writing documentation.
Technical documentation describes how your application or API works. Internal documentation explains how your organization function.
When you spell out who is responsible for invisible work, you prevent it from falling into women's laps. These tasks can be added and accounted for in sprints. Where internal documentation explicitly assigns the less glamorous work to the team.
The payoff? Less unspoken pressure for women to perform underappreciated work. Women can focus more of their time on high prestige projects and start climbing that ladder.
Lack of Mentoring for New Developers
Many companies are "afraid" of hiring early career devs. The common excuses are:
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All of their work must be done by senior talent
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There aren't any senior developers to mentor the early-career developers.
The first excuse seems improbable. I have a hard time believing that all of a company's work must be done by the most senior of engineers.
The second excuse can be solved by documentation.
Figure out the most mission-critical tasks and write them down in an internal knowledge base. Extra points if some of the onboarding material includes screencasts. Folks retain more information when content is presented in a video rather than text form.
And finally, documentation aimed towards new developers helps more seasoned programmers too.
Beyond the 10x Engineer
Instead of looking for 10x developers, tech companies should throw their resources into molding 10x programmers. There are fewer codebase secrets with comprehensive documentation.
And finally, when you have systems that empower every developer to be an overachiever, you don't have to hold on to clever bullies. Institutional and technical knowledge is not locked up inside one person's brain. It's equally distributed throughout the team.
How to get started
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Make contributing to documentation part of the performance review. Ensure that there are professional awards tied to keeping the documentation up-to-date.
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Every month designate one engineer responsible for writing and maintaining the docs. Be sure to name names- make sure you have an accountable team member in charge of docs every month.
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Onboarding new developers is a great way to "stress test" documentation. Everything that the new team member finds confusing or unclear should go into the documentation.
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Want another stress test? Encourage the team lead to go on an extended vacation and see what breaks. Be sure to record the gaps of knowledge between the engineering lead and the rest of the team, and be sure to fill in those gaps with documentation.
Conclusion
Knowledge is power, and this power should be distributed equally.
We shouldn't keep a bully around because they are a 10x engineer. We also shouldn't allow one engineer (usually a woman) to shoulder the responsibility of writing the docs to the detriment of their career. Everyone should be maintaining the code base and the knowledge base.