When I was a teenager one of my favorite series of books was Inside Macintosh. Sure I liked lots of fiction stuff as well, but in terms of technical books that really changed how I thought about things in high school, this was it. The design of the early Macintoshes was elegant, whilst also having to deal with limitations of the time — the library routines for much of the operating system were baked into ROM for example, but there was a method to cowboy patch them as required. The books were comprehensive, readable to a mildly talented hobbyist, and best of all were sitting on the shelf of my local library.
That last bit is the key point I am thinking about right now. If Inside Macintosh had not been on that library shelf, there would have been something else there and I probably would have read it, mainly because the information available to us teenagers in my pre-Internet teenaged years was really defined by outside forces.
I think that leads to some of my “information hoarder” tendencies now. I’ve always wanted to know how the machines work, but there are more machines than I could ever possibly have the time to understand. So instead I acquire the information as it is available, and archive it in case I need it some other time. There are thousands of books in my house for example, and it took me a long time to accept that I needed to get rid of some of those books so that newer and hopefully better books could take their places. I also have notebooks, archives of podcasts, and so on. I literally still have my engineering notebooks for a job I left 20 years ago on a shelf I can reach from this char.
To a large extent this blog itself is part of that hoarding behavior — if a notebook entry isn’t somehow too embarrassing, too half baked, or too confidential then it should appear here because why wouldn’t I want other people to perhaps benefit from it? The fact that approximately no one reads this blog is irrelevant in that context. Its about archival of knowledge for me more than it is about having an adoring following.
(The other factor here is also probably that I feel I am quite forgetful, so I tend to need to write things down so I remember how to do them again later).
So here’s the thing. I do not see these behaviors in my younger coworkers who grew up not only with the Internet, but also drowning in super niche bespoke content. They’re much more comfortable with the idea that the information will always be out there if they need it and they can just search or ask a LLM when the time comes. I think the generation growing up now will be even more laid back about the availability of the knowledge they need when they need it, they are after all growing up with personal machine learning assistants that can provide plausible answers to pretty much any question they choose to ask.
I don’t think either group is wrong as such, but I do think it drives a lot of tension between the teams I’ve worked with about things like how much documentation a project should produce and to what standard. Along the same lines, most older people expect to navigate to content via external hierarchy such as tables of contents or indices, whereas younger people expect to be able to search and just land at the bit they need.
I guess the theory here in as much as I have one is — the approach to how to document and teach needs to be tailored to the age group of the recipients. Content that helps people fix their immediate problem based on having landed within your documentation from a search having read none of its introductory material is going to work better with younger people than content that expects a big investment in terms of bootstrapping before any value can be derived.