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> Veterans are invaluable in military service, as they are in any other endeavor. Trade them off against ease-of-management at your own peril.

I never said that experience isn't valuable. The question was whether experience at a particular company was more valuable than experience outside of it. Every time you hire a senior engineer from another company you learn a bit of their secret sauce, making your company stronger. Participating in that knowledge trade is extremely valuable, and without churn you will be left out as most of your engineers will have mostly experience from your company, that is a really bad thing.

Excellent point IMO! For an organization to believe itself the sole proprietor of relevant and useful knowledge within it's domain of operation is pure hubris.

So too is believing it is anything more than a community of individuals, cooperating on the basis of shared- and tacit knowledge as well as skill to perform the different tasks that comprise business operations. Tacit knowledge and skill resides in the specific individuals, and shared knowledge in the specific relations between individuals. Losing an individual is losing part of aggregate tacit knowledge and skill, as well as all the specific relations shared by the individual. The organization as a thing-in-the-world loses part of itself not captured by it's charter and governing contracts (or share value, or business strategy, i could go on). These things are hard to quantify on the best of days, so to assume (or even mandate) that this cost is incurred with net benefit (by, as you say, hiring some industry heavy-hitter who is expected to bring the goods) is fraught with unknowns, and on balance likely hubris.

If your business requires a lot of knowledge specific to your products, think adobe Photoshop, it is hubris to think a new hire experienced even in relevant fields could meaningfully contribute for a long time. If your product uses an industry standard framework or standard, think adobe reader, then yeah, you can probably have someone hit the ground running. But a bigger problem is that when a new hire leaves after 2-3 years and you replace them with a couple people fresh out of school, so that anything they don't come out knowing has to get taught again. And if it takes some large fraction of the 2-3 years to learn your domain specific knowledge you are done for.

I don't think that hiring people to get outside knowledge is that useful in IT.

From what I understand there is no such other occupation that is sharing so much information between people. You have blogs, loads of free and paid materials, you have loads of conferences where you can send your staff to see "how others are doing it".

Other thing that I often see ... a lot of developers really invest in "outside knowledge" and common problem in dev teams is building stuff with new shiny tech or in a new way they saw on the conference.

> I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true

Not there either. You mess up more in the beginning. Experienced workers have better flow.

I would assume this as well, when i think about it. I guess learning about the industrial revolution in school kind of messed up my preconceptions.

Anyhow, this military comparison just keeps sprouting thoughts in my head. Isn't an owner-management almost perfectly comparable to aristocratic officership? Is GGP's theory of defensible churn basically a modern incarnation of feudalism and aristocratic privelege?

In the military attrition is even worse because you can't fill gaps by hiring from any competitors!

French Foreign Legion would like a word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Liberation_Army

> To make workers replaceable is to rely mostly on the knowledge you can reasonably expect to regain on rehire.

Fortunately, we developed systems of writing, so that the limit to this relearning is higher now than a few millennia ago. (Society does the ultimate “rehiring” continually.)

I think that far too many companies (including my own) rely much too heavily on “things that are in people’s heads” and don’t spend enough time and money on making the company knowledge effectively outlast any individual employee, making it easier to put the essential knowledge into new people’s heads.

Society doesn’t rediscover pi, e, I, and calculus from first principles every half-century, but rather we’ve instituted that knowledge into books and mechanisms of teaching.

Well yes, if we could only train new employees for 20 years in the specific curricula of the organization, as that is how long we spend getting pi and calculus into the heads of kids.

On the scale of lifetimes, I don't think we can refer to it as "churn" as understood in the context of a modern company.

I'm being facile, of course. Developing a good library of knowledge as you propose is hard, takes a long time and many iterations and there is the unfortunate matter of time taking it's toll on the relevance of such recorded knowledge (esp. in our line of work). Not to mention costs. Even academic institutions, who are in the business of doing exactly this, guard their staff with tenure (some of the staff anyway, the big boys)

It takes 20 years because kids come from all kinds of backgrounds and there isn't enough funding for individualized support. A company should be able to get someone up to speed faster since that person is presumably chosen for that role based on existing proficiency. It's easier to piece together an understanding of the system from the napkin scratch notes of the person who got hit by a bus than it is to hope they come out of the coma before the business fails. Imperfect documentation is better than none.

We are not in disagreement here. I was making a comparison in kind as a cheap rhetoric trick. Documentation is good, no documentation bad, good documentation can be better.

Slide along the scale towards more and better documentation and our perceptions might diverge. I don't think all the valuable know-how that goes in to fulfilling a specific role in a larger organization (and in particular the marginal knowledge, relations and skill that increases performance) can be captured in words. Even if it were, there is so much of it and it is full of subtle nuance and context sensitivity. On top of that each individual person takes to different parts of it in different ways. The things you can only learn by jumping in at the deep end. We all know, deep inside, that this is the stuff that matters and I see no reason to play charades and pretend we can know or see how even half of what we do really works. If we did, the world would be a very different place. Until then: tacit, implicit, context bound and relation contingent knowledge and skill will be the light that shines on our practice; and what we can put in to words, a mere shadow.

True enough, but look at your last point.

> Society doesn’t rediscover pi, e, I, and calculus from first principles every half-century, but rather we’ve instituted that knowledge into books and mechanisms of teaching.

How long and how many resources does it take to train someone to understand pi, e, and calculus?

Or, to apply your nice analogy to the topic under discussion.

what are the expected costs (time + training support) to get a new hire trained on all of the written materials which describe the system?

For a non-trivial system, those costs can be very high.

“I think that far too many companies (including my own) rely much too heavily on “things that are in people’s heads” and don’t spend enough time and money on making the company knowledge effectively outlast any individual employee”

Totally agree but I have never seen a company implement this consistently. They seem to expect that while you are under constant deadlines you also have time to document your stuff thoroughly. We also need systems to organize the documentation so you need to hire tech writers who do that. If you put this on engineers they most likely won’t do it because they don’t have time.