I can appreciate that. I just think we were arguing the same points overall; and as demonstrated, there’s a lot not nuance, not only to the idea of what “replace” means, whether it’s simply having someone fill the role, or having someone do the same job at approximately the same efficiency and level of output, to what other factors may go into the job that cannot be transferred to newcomers by way of speech, text, or video.
There’s certainly a lot to the discussion, as is the way with many things, but the amount you can help the next person by why of documentation, should always, ALWAYS be something that’s baked into the job.
Hilariously, I advocated for better documentation at my employer, they gave me every excuse under the sun about it. I was only really asking “which documentation system are we moving forward with?” And got no clear answer. Work has ~4 different sets of documentation, all of which are in varying levels of being obsolete, irrelevant, or incomplete. I wanted to fix it and nobody could decide what to do, so I did nothing.
About two months ago, I hit burnout, and now I’m on medical leave. So essentially, I had a bunch of information that nobody else had, and I was incapable of putting it into documentation, either due to the uncertainty of where to put it, or the whole zero hours a week that work gave me to document things… And then I was metaphorically hit by a bus.
yeah. I have the feeling that this story is way too common. which is very telling of how much the system isn’t driven towards innovation as many claim. we brag a lot about human ability to pass down knowledge via written language and turns out that most information passed down on some of the highest tech industries is done verbally or not at all! lol
I can appreciate that. I just think we were arguing the same points overall; and as demonstrated, there’s a lot not nuance, not only to the idea of what “replace” means, whether it’s simply having someone fill the role, or having someone do the same job at approximately the same efficiency and level of output, to what other factors may go into the job that cannot be transferred to newcomers by way of speech, text, or video.
There’s certainly a lot to the discussion, as is the way with many things, but the amount you can help the next person by why of documentation, should always, ALWAYS be something that’s baked into the job.
Hilariously, I advocated for better documentation at my employer, they gave me every excuse under the sun about it. I was only really asking “which documentation system are we moving forward with?” And got no clear answer. Work has ~4 different sets of documentation, all of which are in varying levels of being obsolete, irrelevant, or incomplete. I wanted to fix it and nobody could decide what to do, so I did nothing.
About two months ago, I hit burnout, and now I’m on medical leave. So essentially, I had a bunch of information that nobody else had, and I was incapable of putting it into documentation, either due to the uncertainty of where to put it, or the whole zero hours a week that work gave me to document things… And then I was metaphorically hit by a bus.
Sucks to be them.
yeah. I have the feeling that this story is way too common. which is very telling of how much the system isn’t driven towards innovation as many claim. we brag a lot about human ability to pass down knowledge via written language and turns out that most information passed down on some of the highest tech industries is done verbally or not at all! lol