Watching a tutorial of the new AWS Honeycode... One of the first comments is "Please make sure it is well documented and supported.". Seems like a bad documented product like that is doomed to fail pretty much instantly. But it got me thinking. In general, why do you think the documentation issues happen systematically with AWS products? Do you think it's by design (some non apparent rationale) or an internal systemic issue?

I assume a lot of them start as internal tools used by Amazon and benefit from institutional knowledge

Yes, thanks! @Chris Knott. What about the products that have been out for years without good documentation?

i’ve written probably more than 5000 words of complaints about amazon docs just in venting to coworkers lmao

few people seem to enjoy writing docs. I also assume they are rarely directly incentives to write docs and especially good docs. I've thought about trying to start a company to write well written docs and get companies to pay us to write and manage their docs. Keeping the quality high seems hard because finding people that can write good docs is hard although maybe that's what editors are for. There is at least one startup trying to kind of do it but AFAIK they aren't writing the docs themselves they're just trying to automate which is not really docs IMO https://readme.com/

I could maybe get that the whole rush to market (beta testing and so on) and that docs are hard and boring to create/update are deterrents, but after a while from product launch, isn't there a single PM internally that thought "you know what? maybe the greatest ROI at this point is just to improve docs?, Can we do at least an A/B test or something?" Or maybe actually having good docs is not a great ROI from AWS standpoint somehow -hard to imagine don't know. But yeah would love to hear about the internal incentives that converge in such behavior.