Even if absolutely everything is documented there is still the loss of familiarity and comfort working with a given system.
Having perfectly documented processes still might mean that a new engineer could take multiple hours following instructions to do what the person who originally built the system managed off the top of their head in fifteen minutes.
In these advanced and complex spaces loosing an employee and starting someone new is like starting a university degree.
Shure, the knowledge exists and you can “just read the books”.
But that takes a fuckton of time in which the new guy is not productive AND needs someone else time to teach them.
if the company is functioning properly this is absolutely not the case
I guess I’ve never worked for a company that functions properly, then. They must be pretty rare.
it’s so rare that it basically only exists in well run companies and well run FOSS projects (which are few and far between)
We have daily meetings in the software team just to battle this
Daily what? 😪
it is
They stopped existing when the relationship between companies and their employees became a directly adversarial one.
Even if absolutely everything is documented there is still the loss of familiarity and comfort working with a given system.
Having perfectly documented processes still might mean that a new engineer could take multiple hours following instructions to do what the person who originally built the system managed off the top of their head in fifteen minutes.
In these advanced and complex spaces loosing an employee and starting someone new is like starting a university degree. Shure, the knowledge exists and you can “just read the books”. But that takes a fuckton of time in which the new guy is not productive AND needs someone else time to teach them.
So it’s a really big loss.
documentation and knowledge sharing my dude