"most employees in the technical arena do not communicate very well or not at all about what they do, the so call job security, so difussion of know how is a must among employees in any group and the manager and supervisor must be aware of that."

I think STEM workers are excellent communicators. We say what we mean and mean what we say, and don't engage in a lot of irrelevant small-talk or euphemisms or misdirections... though we do exercise a bit of creative play.

But we've been taught over the last several decades, NOT to "diffuse" or "transfer" knowledge, because as soon as many of us did, they were dumped. Diffusing and transferring knowledge is the high-speed highway to unemployment, the death-knell of STEM careers. It's something we had to be carefully taught (to paraphrase a line from an old musical from my parents' era).

It runs totally against our natural gregariousness with fellow STEM enthusiasts, who used to delight in discussions of new things we'd learned, new approaches we were working on, brick walls we'd slammed into, or great new things we heard about which we may never get to actually use at work.

I also believe technical writing has dropped in quality, in part because of the adoption of the OO approach of capsulization, but also because of the adoption of hyper-documents, and the data-base concept of rooting out redundancies to simplify db maintenance. Most of the tech writing these days is severely lacking in context. You can't see both the diagram and the words describing its details at the same time, certainly not in the stupid micro-form e-readers. The best you can do is flip flip flip flip flip flip hopping back and forth and among multiple doc snippets, viewing each in isolation and as rapid succession as is possible to try to regain the context. And then there are the language barriers.

I believe more developers should do more of their own writing... but the management doesn't want that, either; they're not willing to pay a developer to spend his time writing documentation or doing tech support, both of which can provide valuable direction for new development.