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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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YMMV; staying can work well but you really have to know your employer, and be able to roll with the punches either way. It can be equally risky to be the new guy again. Always have an honest understanding of your replaceability.
If you're irreplaceable, you're probably doing something wrong, at least in tech.
All technical fields especially should have a high bar for documenting what you do and how you do it, requiring documentation in every form and for every aspect. In my field, IT support/sysadmin/network admin, process, procedure, common fixes, system set up, network design, etc should all be documented. The only down side to having to replace me should be the long lead time for the new person to chew through the documentation to fully understand what's going on and how it's all interconnected, and not much more.
IMO, person to person "knowledge transfer" as my current employer currently implements, is unviable, and should not be allowed to be the norm. There should never be only one person at an org that knows the job, and the current state of affairs and why the current state is what it is.
If any org does have that single worker point of failure in knowledge, then they're just one incident with a bus away from significant risk of their systems entirely collapsing. I call this the individuals "bus factor", aka, if you're hit by a bus, how fucked is everyone else? An IT person's bus factor should always be low since almost all businesses are data management companies that make money doing X; everything from users Rolodex, to the CRM, to their communications and daily working tools, are almost always entirely dependent on IT, in some way, shape, or form. Less so for companies doing non-computer controlled manufacturing, but any desk job, or white collar office would entirely collapse if their IT staff was suddenly unavailable and their IT environment was to go down. At that point, just close up shop.
I don't think I agree with you, replaceability depends on a lot of factors, really.
I'm a lead dev who works mostly in test automation and dev ops. I can assure you that no matter how much and thoroughly I document and share knowledge (I've became known in my company for that since every piece of doc has my name somewhere on it lol) I can't see anyone around there being able to fully take the reins if something happened to me.
in my case, it's a mixture of talent crisis in the industry, lack of interest/expertise in the field and my own company's culture (that doesn't value these infrastructural subjects enough). I bet other people from different areas in tech might share different reasons
but all in all, being irreplaceable is hardly an employee's fault. if a company can't manage to lose an employee (or lets people get away without documenting/sharing knowledge) it's entirely their own fault!
I absolutely get what you're saying, and it definitely depends on a lot of factors, mainly how easily replaceable you are.
I agree with the fact that it takes a combination of talent, experience/expertise in the field, and the company itself (mainly it's culture) that can dictate a lot of that. However, things like previous experience, and talent are not exactly things you can pass on to a new technician via any form of documentation without chronicling your life story with every instance of needing to do anything remotely technical which may lean into the problem-solving skills and thought process you uniquely have, and even then, on-boarding that experience would be a monumental challenge. Simply put, that's not practical. Even that, doesn't account for any ability to pass on talent, which isn't quantifiable in any meaningful way.
The main argument I have is that the knowledge of the organization's systems, how they interconnect, why those interconnections matter, how they work, etc. should not be up for question or debate; and it should only be a matter of finding someone with relevant past experience in similar systems, with sufficient talent, who meshes adequately with the company culture, to be found, in order to replace someone.
Unfortunately, finding someone with sufficient talent is often the most difficult part, and since it's difficult to assess talent in an interview or even a set of interviews, it's usually impossible to know if someone is going to "fit the bill" so-to-speak, until they've been thrown into the fire.... This is the reason for the probationary period of most workers, both for the benefit of the worker, if they're not meshing with the company, and for the company, if the worker isn't capable of doing the job. Unfortunately, often, especially with I.T. work, it's difficult to know whether someone is going to work out long-term after a few months, especially when the amount of knowledge someone needs to have to actually do most tech jobs is so monumental that it's unlikely that the new hire is going to have any significant depth of knowledge in the technical systems within a few months of being hired.
All of this sets aside the factor that every individual is unique and makes unique choices and contributions to the whole, so even "replacing" a very replaceable individual position, isn't a 1:1 comparison, the new worker may be worse, or indeed, even better, than the previous one, but rarely, if ever, would perform EXACTLY the same in every circumstance.
My core argument is that the information about the system (which needs to be supplemented by talent and experience), should never be lost if an employee decides to walk (either by finding a new job, walking in front of a bus, or off a short pier). If that information is lost, it's a significant managerial oversight which allowed that to happen.
yep, agreed will all of that
in any case, I never been somewhere where this is properly done to the letter (from an individual's or managerial's perspective). not that I REALLY care tbf, I just do my part to the best of my knowledge and fly away hehe
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