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Comment by r2dnb | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know people were so generous. The experience I have is that all people want to keep their knowledge for themselves. In all the companies I passed by - including Fortune 40 ones - the documentation was non existent.

In one of them, a magician who wrote a 20k lines of code Access program doing fancy things like generating stored procedures on the fly, still knew more about the program after 2 years of development than the 10 people team that was in charge of migrating it.

More recently - last week - in another company, someone told me very naturally that the requirements were in someone's head and in the database schema and that we should rely on this person's expertise and avoid spending time to lay the requirements down before starting the iteration.

The world I live in is much more political than the one that you guys seem to live in. Please give me the address.

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I don't know. All the places I've worked for so far had close to zero useful documentation, but the reason had nothing to do with people "keeping knowledge for themselves". It was simply because there's always something more important to do than writing documentation and keeping it up to date. Everyone tells themselves and each other that someone has to do it eventually, and in the end, it never happens.

There is a world of difference between service rendered and sharing knowledge voluntarily. This article specifically described the former which is precisely due to the lack of latter, whether Business Insider Research realized it or not.

Once work collaboration is viewed not as an effective means to add value but the value itself, common job security motif can drive the work place to a popularity contest. Meeting invites and social connection are some of the examples of there are more to the service demands one must draw at work place.

Business Inside only scratched the surface and jumped on a convenient conclusion.

I love your reasoning, very insightful thanks a lot for sharing. This is the kind of wisdom and out-of-the-box thinking I like to read.

That has been exactly my experience as well. There exist job places where "the requirements is in his head" is considered normal and in order and there is too much respect given to such "job security" selfish aes who never share things voluntarily.

As contrast, at an earlier work place there were "mentors" introducing newcomers to the domain holding introductory crash courses and doing code reviews. I understand why so many job posts here in Sweden stress the importance of knowledge sharing for common (not individual) success. Sharing knowledge means that more people can share the burden - not the other way around.

Amen.

I think the reason people are afraid of sharing is that very few people practice continuous learning. They keep using what they learned 5, 10, 20 years ago, therefore - to their mind - if they share it, they are left with nothing.

I don't mind sharing as I read like crazy, learn new things all the time, and improve my way of doings things so that I do and understand things much better than I did 5 years ago.

Most domain knowledge in one corporation has zero value outside that corporation . There's too much path dependence.

And the older the learning, generally the more general it is. There are a million ways to do everything, but a team will have Stockholm Syndrome with how it does things, generally.

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