You think this is a joke, but I’m completely serioius.

Here’s a conversation that I have had…more than once. It’s almost always in this format.

“Should I put this in OneNote? Azure DevOps? Sharepoint?”
“No, just put it in a readme in the repository” “But [support/business owner] doesn’t have access to the repos.” “Well maybe they should.” “Okay, well but until they do, where should I put this?”

And there’s never a good answer. Because this information is useful to developers, it should probably go as close to the code as possible.
As a developer, I want all the documentation in my repo so I can stumble upon it if I full-text-search in my IDE. QA doesn’t want to write MD files because they like the formatting slickness of oneNote. Adding images is more cumbersome in MD. Fine.

But the info is also useful for business…or support…or some other random bunch of people who don’t/shouldn’t/can’t have access to the code repos.
So…where do THEY look for stuff? Should you chop the data in pieces, business stuff in oneNote, dev stuff in git?
No, just duplicate it, so then only the info in git will stay up to date and then business will make out of date assumptions.

Documentation is the bane of my existence. I write a lot of it and no one ever likes where I put it, or they can’t even find it even though I think I’ve put it right in front of them and I’ve just wasted all my time.

And I see their point. I can never find other peoples’ documentation when I want it. Did they make a random self-hosted site? Wtf? Why?! How am I supposed to know they did that?! WHAT.

The only thing I think of that would POSSIBLY address this issue…is a librarian.
I want to pay someone to catalog and then keep organized my and others’ documentation. And then when I need to find it, I ask the librarian, or the system they put in place to help me locate the information. I don’t want to have to think about it, I just want a system and I want it to work.
That’s what librarians do, right? We have the Dewey Decimal System for a reason! And there would be a library. ONE library. For all the documentation.

I have several friends who have degrees in library sciences and they’re all bummed that they can’t really do what they want because libraries are getting short-sheeted. It seems similar to the issue of PostDocs, and Museum Curator positions. The people in the Professor and Curator positions can do those jobs basically until they die, and there are only a small handful of them in the first place…so the people who want those jobs have to just hang around until that time (or commit murder, but…). So…librarians are the same, right?

Let’s hire library science majors. Let’s make it a thing for software shops to have an internal library, run and managed by people who trained for it in school.

Is this already a thing somewhere and I don’t know about it? Do places like Google already have a good system of handling documentation? If my recent experience in some code tutorials is any evidence, I suspect not, but maybe its different for internal-facing stuff? In any case, MY company has this problem and everyone complains about it. So I’m just going to keep shouting that we should hire a librarian until it happens.

Join me.