State of the industry
At the time of writing, the tech industry generally finds itself in an interesting place. The years of wild spending and tech startup valuations are behind us. The unstoppable growth of tech has slowed, and the industry can no longer do whatever it wants and expect no one to question it or everyone to accept it.
No matter what happens in the rest of the tech industry around us, one statistic glaringly remains in survey after survey of developer opinions and ecosystems. People want and need better documentation. The race to build over the past few years led to a plethora of applications that may or may not be well built, but often don’t make a lot of sense to internal or external users. There are budget cuts in the industry at the moment, and sometimes, roles outside of engineering are some of the first to go. But if you are open to learning and learning how to learn, there will be a role for you for a while.
It would be naive and dishonest of me to tell you that the industry isn’t in the midst of a massive state of change. The last chapters of this book will cover AI-based tools that have swept through everything in the past year or so. It remains to be seen if they are the game changer everyone promises or just another ride of the hype rollercoaster, but there’s no doubt that they will affect how we create and consume documentation in the medium term.
Automated tools for generating some parts of documentation have existed for a while, but the new wave of AI-powered options is definitely more powerful and nuanced than anything before. They can’t cover the complete documentation requirements yet, but they can fill many gaps and needs. With regards to the state of the industry and our role in it, even if everyone decides to replace their documentation platforms with AI-powered bots, they still need someone to write the source material that feeds the AI for a while. We may write less for direct human consumption, but we will still be writing.
