[wilsynet]

Both Amazon and Google have document writing cultures. If you want to propose an idea, you write a doc about it.

The value of a doc writing culture is that writing things down encourages rigor and thoughtfulness. Docs can be widely distributed, and you can read it, think about it, and add comments. Exchanging ideas can be asynchronous rather than meeting oriented.

But also it can all get a bit carried away (because these artifacts become an important component to promotion).

I work at Google, which is a doc culture. But I worked most of my career at startups where we never wrote anything down. Overall, I prefer doc cultures. But yes, left to it’s own devices it can seem like you are working at a doc factory.

[user_named]

I worked at a startup without any documentation. The cto knew everything, because he'd been in every meeting and made every decision. Everyone else became somewhat helpless due to lack of information.

[jeffbee]

Doc culture is better than the alternative. 95% of docs get thrown away because half-way through writing it you realize it cannot work. In the absence of the design doc, you will instead hand-wave your way through the design phase and realize the mistake after several people have wasted time actually implementing it. It is a very, very good thing to know whether your idea solves or does not solve the given problem, at the earliest opportunity.

[danjac]

There's a happy medium. Even a startup can do with some well-maintained READMEs. But the problem with startups is churn, which makes for docs that rapidly go out of date, and the only thing worse than no docs is out of date docs that lead you down the wrong path.