8mo ago

True story

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I was a team lead. Painstakingly created documentation for everything.
New boss in town. Says destroy it all and stop making more.
Stopped being team lead. That shit was demoralizing. Years of work down the drain for no reason.
People who enforce cultures of tribal knowledge are either idiotic or covering for their own incompetence.
- What a moron.
  My company hired me specifically to help get everything from the only guy who knows the system documented.
  Well, that's how it started, at least.
  
  I've tried to make documentation, it got nuked while I was away, now I hide it all in the source code as doxygen mark-up.
  I'm now the "expert" on doxygen.
  
  I need a documenter!
  I have a head full of stuff that hasn't had time to be documented, and being a single point of knowledge isn't job security, it's a major risk.
  My code gets documented. But so much infrastructure is just held in my head as senior SysAdmin. Wherever possible I just have a ride-along "up-skilling" (works like a RAID mirror for my brain).
- I came across this early in my career in networking. I ended up having to support another technicians customer(we primarily managed our own workloads) and he did not use the tools(vault) we had to manage the network equipment credentials, so I always had to call him and ask him what the password is and why he doesn't update it in the vault(it frequently changed) ... After bothering him enough about it he said it was job security.
  This was a 45k entry level job that he was years into. Why someone would want job security at the bottom part of the totem pole is beyond me, but that is where I mostly came across tribalistic tendencies(I worked in a lot of small/medium sized companies before getting a big break)
  If I look up those people on LinkedIn, they're exactly where they were or in another lateral position. They don't tend to make it very far.
- Absolute fuckwits. I have to deal with a "I don't document and i also treat anyone who asks questions like an idiot" dev
  Dude think it makes him look good. We all think it makes him look grossly unprofessional.
  (Also i am having a grand time playing Big Fat Idiot and handballing everything to him every time we hit issues. )

Job security!

"Documentation is on discord."
"Why can't I join"
"We banned you after seeing what you post on social media."
- It would rather go like that:
  "Documentation is on discord."
  "Why"

At one of the companies I worked out we had a head dev like this, except he didn't want to spend any time teaching the juniors so we just had to kinda figure it out from eachother

Well, I guess if you don't mind me (and every other team member) asking you 100 questions a day, that's fine by me!

More like the other way around

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