— The intern I just had to fire last month. She pretended because her generation was born with iPhones, that knowing advanced computer skills like Cmd+V was something that wasn’t a given at 21 years old. It blew my expectations about school - but at least school teaches them to find unexpected arguments.
I think her assessment of the situation is fair.
They can’t belong on the side of the world where we make things. She’ll forever belong in the people we’ve designed our apps for, viewing videos, playing games, instagram models, struggling to afford a flat. Maybe we’ll make her rich! Our apps will decide that.
This makes no sense given that you get the same payoff by using something like Atlassian's wiki. No git, no markdown, none of this nonsense, users can just immediately hit the ground running with advanced formatting support and version history.
I think you're lacking a lot of empathy for nontechnical users. I don't see how you could ever argue that your git + Obsidian stack is "more valuable" than an off-the-shelf wiki solution.
I have empathy for non technical people in that I believe Markdown is far easier to use than Atlassian's interface. Every single developer I've worked with has been tearing their hair out when trying to write documentation on Confluence and documentation never got written as a result. If this is the experience for technical people, what on earth is the experience like for non-technical people?
Nobody cares. Really, they do not. This doesn't help the business, it adds way too much overhead, and requires nontechnical people to understand markdown and git.
I have never heard nontechnical people complain about the Confluence wiki. From their perspective, everything Just Works. Imagine having to tell them all the things that they can't do because of Markdown's limitations, and how much harder it is to do drop-dead simple things like adding tables. Can't you see how that's a 100x higher barrier than anything you can complain about for Atlassian? Anything that you're frustrated at with their editor, you probably can't even do in Markdown. All the markdown stuff is easy.
Except that like all WYSIWYG editors, Confluence's editor is buggy and unpredictable. You can only use it in a browser. Because it doesn't even have a 'raw' editing mode anymore, you can't work around the WYSIWYG editor when it's broken. Uploading or converting to it from external sources is a PITA, when it's even possible.
If you want technical documentation that developers are going to maintain, it has to be a joy to work with in their own editors.
WYSIWYG isn't actually better. It's a broken paradigm, and that's why every single attempt to move Wikipedia over to a WYSIWYG editor has failed.
Not what we're talking about here though, OP is suggesting it's reasonable to teach business analysts markdown and git for all company documentation.
