I guess that many people just suck at writing. Programmers who refuse to write documentation, insisting that everything in their code is perfectly obvious. Managers who organize a meeting, without sending the agenda beforehand and the meeting minutes afterwards. I think this is the reason, because if those people are somehow forced to write something, the results are often horrible. (Ironically, they can later use this as an evidence that written communication sucks.)
Or perhaps they are not sure about something, and do not want to reveal their ignorance in writing. If I write you half page describing the problem, and I made a stupid mistake at the beginning, it will be perfectly visible. If instead I just write “hey, can we have a call?”, I leave no written record. Even if I type in chat, at least I can packpedal after seeing that I got something wrong.
I guess that many people just suck at writing. Programmers who refuse to write documentation, insisting that everything in their code is perfectly obvious. Managers who organize a meeting, without sending the agenda beforehand and the meeting minutes afterwards. I think this is the reason, because if those people are somehow forced to write something, the results are often horrible. (Ironically, they can later use this as an evidence that written communication sucks.)
Or perhaps they are not sure about something, and do not want to reveal their ignorance in writing. If I write you half page describing the problem, and I made a stupid mistake at the beginning, it will be perfectly visible. If instead I just write “hey, can we have a call?”, I leave no written record. Even if I type in chat, at least I can packpedal after seeing that I got something wrong.
Former boss: you don’t need comments, you can just look at the code and see what it does..
Me: you need comments to tell you why it does it...