I'm surprised at how negative a lot of people are around tutorial writers. In my (biased) experience, tutorial writers are

a) relatively good at what they do and what they're teaching, even if they're beginners and

b) definitely not driven by "showing off" or "building their CV" motivations.

Tech is hard. There is a lot of it out there. It's always changing. There are a lot of variables in terms of your set up and your needs. Maybe not every tutorial is going to solve your exact problem or remove all of your headaches, but imagine trying to work all of this stuff out without the amazing resource of records of other people trying stuff and taking time to explain.

Apparently back in the day, this was done over email and IRC. You would wait days to get an explanation from someone and some code to try out, and spend days hacking at stuff trying to figure it out for yourself.

Now you can find a tutorial that's specific to your needs and if you don't like it, you can read through 10-100 others.

Tech is hard, and tutorials aren't going to fix that. You'll still have to battle through your issues, alternating between emotions of "this is impossible. I'm not competent enough" and "OMG it works this is amazing". That's most of programming. If you don't like that experience, it's probably best to pick a slower moving field.

That's the "tech is hard" bit. Now writing. Writing is also hard. And because since school most people are put either into a "Arts" bucket or a "Science" bucket, very few people take time to figure out how sentence construction works and how to piece if statements together. It's quite admirable that people who have actively hated and avoided writing for most of their lives still see a gap and try to fill it by writing explanatory materials, usually for free.

And then there's education which is hard even if you're good at writing and good at technology. The curse of knowledge is a big hurdle. Finding the correct balance between maintaining a focus on one thing and giving enough context to that thing that you're explaining is hard.

So yes, I highly encourage everyone to get better at writing. Better at education. Better at technology. But to be good at all three is rare, and most of these people find they fit pretty well at universities as lecturers, where only a very limited number of students have access to them.

If you're keen to help fix the problem that you point out, add your voice. Spend some time writing a high quality tutorial after you find the solution to a problem that you're having. Find time to edit the tutorial for good flow, bugs, and everything else that makes a tutorial frustrating to follow.

I maintain a short list of technical writing and publishing resources [0], which I'd love to see more contributions to. I also write tutorials for CodeMentor [1], and a few other places[3]. Technical content is hugely valuable, so if you're interested in contributing, it's usually easy to find community editors at large sites who will give you free guidance and editing, and often even pay you for your content while letting you keep it under an open source license.

If you want help or advice on how to write, this is an open invitation to contact me through Twitter or Email and I'll happily look over your drafts, discuss outlines, or generally help you become a better writer.

[0] https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-writing

[1] https://www.codementor.io/garethdwyer/posts

[2] https://dwyer.co.za/writing.html