Tell me about it. I'm lucky enough to have a supportive manager when I try to define my teams fitness functions, but getting the rest of the team to engage is an exercise in patience testing on all sides.
They don't see the value in writing useless essays, shouldn't self documenting code be enough?
I don't see the value in skipping high resolution communication up front so we can all waste time reworking the same problem for the 5th time that month because we forgot what we decided the 4th time we worked on it.
One suggestion I would add is to make it easy to do the things you ask for. You're already having trouble getting your team to do it, the last thing you want is for them to have to suffer through shitty tooling to do so (and give them another excuse to skip doing it).
Having documentation in anything Atlassian-branded (or similar garbage) is a no-no for example. That's one of the few cases where I would completely understand & support a developer outright refusing to do it.
Writing essays might not be everyone's cup of tea (personally I'm fine with it as long as it will be useful and will not just rot away in darkness forever), but it's manageable with good tools. But if I have to wade through molasses like Confluence, I'd totally understand why nobody wants to engage and wouldn't even be mad at them.
I'm generally not the kind of developer who hides in a cave, but as time goes on I understand them more and more - it turns out a lot of what these "cave" developers don't like involves absolutely terrible tooling that actually regressed over time (despite processing power and system resources constantly increasing).
Very much this. I like to write my documentation in Markdown because it allows me to be fast, while still having some structures. Then I paste the draft in Google Docs when I want to share and have people comment on it. Tooling matters and if I'm the one doing something, I want to actually choose how I'm doing it.
Tell me about it. I'm lucky enough to have a supportive manager when I try to define my teams fitness functions, but getting the rest of the team to engage is an exercise in patience testing on all sides.
They don't see the value in writing useless essays, shouldn't self documenting code be enough?
I don't see the value in skipping high resolution communication up front so we can all waste time reworking the same problem for the 5th time that month because we forgot what we decided the 4th time we worked on it.