Comment by devadvance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devadvance | Hacker News Reader

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Solid post and a well-done reflection on your experience. It's also great that you were able to not only able to ship something, but also get the experience of iterating on it and problem solving along the way. Definitely not an "intern project"!

Digging into a particular thread in your post:

> Later I came to realize that they have a culture of building things inhouse and it shows.

> [...]

> The first I noticed was the old tech, as I mentioned before there is a lot of internally maintained technology and that's good for a few reasons like the fact that you're just a message away from contacting the world wide expert for the technology you're using. But it can also have it's downsides, you don't fully benefit from the fruits of Open Source and it could lead to stagnation and slow development.

You've shown some great observations about what might be simplified as "build versus buy", with buy having options like "actually buy" and "adopt FOSS".

As you grow in your career, I encourage you continue to dig even deeper into the ripple effects of this sort of tech decision. Yes, it might have been better tech than the alternatives at one point in time and there are internal experts for that tech one message away. Long term, that can become a form of institutional knowledge (risk) and sunk cost fallacy (we built it, we should continue investing in it).

In other words, remain curious and be willing to question decisions as the context, culture, and challenge evolve!

> Long term, that can become a form of institutional knowledge (risk)

This is a bit of a tangent but it's something I find surprising in tech (at least the megacorp I work in): institutional knowledge is kept inside people's heads and when they leave, the knowledge is lost and not much is done to stop it.

"That's obvious" you might think but in the US Army for example, there's an organisation [0] that debriefs soldiers returned from deployment and collects their experiences and lessons to disseminate them to the rest of the military (and there are sister organisations in other countries e.g. Australia [1]).

There's an entire field of study dedicated to knowledge management [2] and I know it's present in some large companies but I'm really surprised you never really see it in tech.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Center_for_Army_Less...

[1]: https://cove.army.gov.au/bio/army-knowledge-centre

[2]: https://www.kmworld.com/About/What_is_Knowledge_Management

Godspeed, man; I'm gearing up to have the knowledge management discussion with my organization. 'Chaos' is not an information management strategy!

And lots of companies have offboarding processes that usually include hand overs and an exit interview to serve similar purpose. If most companies were paid billions to kill kids around the world I'm sure they could also afford a whole department just for this too.

If you wait until the employee has given their notice to begin their knowledge transfer, the company has completely lost the plot.

Not only are you asking to compress years of learning into a couple of weeks or months in the best case that they remember everything and want to turn over that knowledge, worst case is sometimes the person is just not available or has forgotten important chunks. And that's not even mentioning layoffs and firings.

Companies don't pay attention to knowledge transfer for the same reason they don't pay attention to technical debt and scope creep - no incentives to do so for the managers who would have to dedicate engineer time to it.

Sorry, my post wasn't clear. These organisations do a lot more than exit interviews, those are just one kind of input.

And knowledge management isn't limited to the military, I just don't know other examples off the top of my head.

Way to misrepresent the _purpose_ of the US military.

I agree, his tone is flippant and outdated. Nowadays the purpose is to give jobs to red states that don’t fund education and drone strike foreign woman and children. Also they tacitly assist when a sitting president starts to try and dismantle our democracy. He really gave our military the short shrift.

Knowledge transfer/documentation should take place regularly and be a continuous ongoing process - not happen only when someone leaves.

Yeah I think you bring up a good point. I actually meant to write a bit more on the Tech Risk aspect of the business. There's a lot of red tape, and it can be overbearing sometimes. But it is a bank so most of these measures are necessary.

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