It is funny to me that hardware engineers are able to test the bejeezus out of essentially solved problems like how many keypresses a keyboard can take before mean operations to failure and document every minute aspect of their development, but software developers are pretty much prohibited from being given the time to document code.
In fact, it strikes me that hardware engineers’ actual job is to produce a specification from which hardware can be built, nearly always by people other than the engineers developing the product. That is to say, the product of the engineers’ labor is documentation.
The software developers, on the other hand, have the ability to document their product in coordination with its development, but are almost always forbidden from taking the time to do so, despite that documentation effort costing far less than the process hardware manufacturers have to go through to tool up a production line for a physical product.
This is a pretty insane state of affairs. If I could only show the public some of the chewed-to-crap, undocumented, wazoo code I’ve seen in production on closed source projects…