There are two sides to the coin with not being able to find things - sometimes it is, as you say, because you are bad at searching for things, but sometimes things haven't been made in an easily searchable way. To name just three:
- sections with ambiguous names;
- multiple sections with the same name; or
- information is split across separate sections/pages.
Worst case is that there is detailed documentation but it's all in the comments of twenty different Jira tickets.
I do agree that user docs and dev docs should be separated though, as should specifications and development logs.
If your documentation doesn't have a search feature, that's the first thing you need to fix.
If you're just bad at searching, well that's a very valuable and learnable skill.
> like setting up my dev environment
> the documentation which had been written both didn't include it (it was customer-facing
The user docs and the dev docs should be different corpses, searchable separately. What you describe sounds very disorganized.