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The problem being a dev at a big company (around 1000 devs) with huge codebase (I mean huge, tens of thousands of modules, if not millions) is that, as many hands touch the code of a project and deadlines are always short, not everyone care about changing the documentation afterwards.

This translates to double the work everytime you need to fix a bug or something as you have to quickly reverse engineer the modules to understand it - the documentation often reflects an old version and it messes things up much more than it helps you out.

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  • 3
    Even worse is when there is no documentation in some subsystems - it is all over someones head, and if the company fires this guy you have no one to resort if you have to touch his code. That is frustrating
  • 1
    Management should address this issue. Maybe dedicated resource to help with proper documentation? Seems it would have major ROI. Thoughts?
  • 1
    Proper comments should be looked at as well as code during the review process. I always do that. It annoys some people but it's necessary
  • 0
    I work at a company from the finance sector, $50b in revenue.

    The IT sector there is massive, ~1000 devs and over 4000 of people supporting operations, project management, infrastructure and so on.

    It is very hard to put code into production, a lot of gates to check code and documentation to hold back potential issues, nonetheless there is still a long way to improve code quality and documentation.

    There are header comments on every program though, and it is a good practice to indicate what you are changing in your version. You can also tag the lines you have changed to simplify posterior checking, but, for instance, if you are a new dev these comments don't help much.
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