You can write documentation all day long, you can't avoid the fact that someone who's spent 10 years working on a project will have so much intricate knowledge about it that they are close to irreplacable. It takes months for a new recruit to get even close to productive if they haven't experienced that technology before. If you required all your team members to document so much that they could walk out the door and not be missed, you'd never get anything done.
Yup. But it's a goal to strive to. Nobody's proposing people spend their entire day documenting, but if they remember to document decisions/knowledge by default they mitigate the problem.
Besides, who said it's a good thing to have one person with 10 years of very specific, undocumented domain expertise? Sure, in rare cases it's some outlier guru. Sometimes you have PhDs who spent 10 years becoming domain experts and you can hardly expect them to be able to serialize it all into the company wiki. That happens. But I'd bet that in most cases these are just people who positioned themselves into a cozy role, guaranteeing you can never let them go. These are liabilities, not assets.
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You can write documentation all day long, you can't avoid the fact that someone who's spent 10 years working on a project will have so much intricate knowledge about it that they are close to irreplacable. It takes months for a new recruit to get even close to productive if they haven't experienced that technology before. If you required all your team members to document so much that they could walk out the door and not be missed, you'd never get anything done.
Yup. But it's a goal to strive to. Nobody's proposing people spend their entire day documenting, but if they remember to document decisions/knowledge by default they mitigate the problem. Besides, who said it's a good thing to have one person with 10 years of very specific, undocumented domain expertise? Sure, in rare cases it's some outlier guru. Sometimes you have PhDs who spent 10 years becoming domain experts and you can hardly expect them to be able to serialize it all into the company wiki. That happens. But I'd bet that in most cases these are just people who positioned themselves into a cozy role, guaranteeing you can never let them go. These are liabilities, not assets.