Hi -
All our junior people are immediately deployed to
projects. One such person was brought into our engineering
group and practically immediately was given responsibility
for making all of NYSERNET work and handling whatever
escalations he could. Another is deployed in dialup and
in assisting with routing matters. Another is busy dealing
with research and resource planning for how we want to scale.
I can think of innumerable engineering and operations
tasks that need doing before deploying a junior engineering
type to writing documentation.
OTOH, we have been working with marketing on the customer
handbook (http://www.sprintlink.net/ has various drafts), so
I imagine that if we had a clever tech writer remarkably
skilled at finding the right moment to talk to busy
engineering folk, we could produce something.
Funnily enough, that's what Vadim and I have already
asked management for, however that's with a view to
documenting our internal procedures so that we can scale
up our own engineering and operations, not to mention all
the other documentation that we need doing internally.
So, to extend the point that Geoff made earlier -- any
resource a busy operator has will get deployed into making
that operator's part of the global Internet _work_, not into
helping out other people. This is not due to a mean lack of
altruism, but rather to the realities of life in a global
network that doubles in size and traffic severy six-to-nine
months or so.
Now, if you go talk to our marketing about the
possibilities of increasing revenue via some of the in-house
documentation we're planning, you might have a big operator
actually produce a book along the lines you are thinking, or
putting together a page for beginning Internet operators.
Try bouncing some ideas off our marketing types; I'd
be happy to pass you on to one in private email.
Sean.