Who writes this stuff? I can speak from personal experience: When I arrived at Xilinx in 1988 I shuddered at the poor organization of the very first Data Book. And I volunteered to create a new one from scratch. And that's what I did, for 5 years in a row. I did not perform the measurements, but I either wrote or edited every single word and every comma, semicolon and hyphen.( I am hot on hyphens...) The advantage of a start-up is that the company can hire overqualified people to do mundane jobs, and do them very well. With over 30 years of engineering experience, I just rolled up my sleeves and dug into it. (The stock options were a nice motivator...) I disagree with the statement that engineers cannot write, and that the job has to be delegated to tech writers. For that's what you get in a more mature company, where the really savvy engineers are up to their ears in design, if they have not yet been promoted to a managerial position. The tech writers know their grammar and spelling, and the Chicago Book of Style, but they usually have never been working engineers. So you get good grammar, but not necessarily good sense. Sometimes not even good grammar... Excellent documentation is rarely elevated to a top priority. That is a sad fact. No need to convince me or Austin or Steve Knapp about the errors of that reasoning. We know and we try our best to help out
Peter Alfke