Two weeks of paid vacation where the company isn't allowed to email them or call them for help: I guarantee that documentation practices will increase substantially.
We didn't write any documentation or have any internal wiki or anything like that, and everything seemed fine.
I also find it pretty questionable that someone couldn't write a computer program that can embezzle unattended for two weeks. You don't use your own credentials, you stick it in some other program and have it use the logged-in user's credentials. Are you auditing your HR system before you log in, and are you sure that the "ls" you're invoking is the same "ls" that actually came from Debian? No? Then it all seems very pointless to me.
Having worked in Middle Office before being promoted to the Front, he had a really good knowledge of how operations and risk management worked in the bank (plus some still working write accesses to specific systems) which allowed him to mask his very large positions with fake opposite trades that he was putting in every day before the nightly risk snapshot and cancelling before they could be confirmed.
The guy basically did not take any holidays in two years - otherwise his large positions would have appeared on Risk radar pretty quickly...
If you are into those stories and want much more details than my poor summary I really recommend reading the SocGen post-mortem investigation.
Disclaimer: I worked at Société Générale during the Kerviel era - also there is a lot of controversy in France about how much the bank knew and let things happen (Kerviel was making a lot of profits - until he wasn’t) and if that was used to cover subprime related loss - this post does not represent an opinion on this case!
If you are a sociopath who knows programming (more and more people in finance do every year) and is in finance (two fields with more sociopaths than some, perhaps), then why would you leave money on the table? You are already morally bankrupt and know how you would get caught, and therefore how to not be caught, and know that this money is going to you with zero issue.
Just evidence that documentation != institutional knowledge. It's not actionable knowledge if no one reads it.
When someone is on leave who has specific knowledge, this is just planned into the sprint. As in "xxx knows most about this feature, so let's wait for him to return".
Even when we do write documentation it just gets lost, or developers don't bother looking anything up.
At least in my team, is see:
- Managers allowing people to only take on specific work, therefore people are becoming highly specialised
- Individual developers don't push others to write documentation, instead they wait until somehow they have to do a task, spend 2 weeks to figure it out, and then write some documentation around it
- Individual developers who force themselves to only work on specific pieces. (I think mostly to fuel their ego so they're needed)
- The company not encouraging knowledge sharing, or simply not providing good tools for it
- Product owners who don't really care about the product
And by innovative I mean “we have no idea how anything works - let’s fix it.”
What is the equivalent of weight decay?
throwing off 75% of knowledge increases generalization capabilities
(actual experience detecting real criminal behaviors within financial claims)