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Comment by smokey_circles | Hacker News Reader

Alternate title: How it took OP years to realise their teammates and colleagues deserve agency.

No such thing as "indispensable". Very few companies and projects die to a singular departure, you're just not that special kiddo.

What's actually happened here is a selfish desire to know things without sharing them. If you learn something new, share it somewhere.

"People came to ask the Oracle questions only the Oracle could answer for the Oracle refused to share knowledge by any other means".

Confluence is pretty good if you use it properly. Weekly knowledge share sessions are also handy.

Learning a thing and sitting on it makes you an asshat, not an asset. Seems OP learned the hardway, but they still need to remove their ego from the equation.

You're not good at knowing things (basic human capability that), you're terrible at sharing them.

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You can lead a colleague to documentation, but you can't make them think.

It doesn't sound to me like knowledge is being hoarded here; it's all there for the taking, but OP's colleagues have discovered it's more convenient for them to ask OP rather than seeking it out for themselves.

Maybe that's an issue with discoverability, or maybe OP has a history of being too available for questions. Sounds to me like OP might in fact be sharing too freely, thus making documentation/experimentation less attractive.

> You can lead a colleague to documentation, but you can't make them think.

You can point them to the docs that answer their repeat questions rather than spending time to write a unique response every time. Author writes that this worked when the questions and answers were made available to others,

> One thing I instituted that helped was a specific Teams channel called Knowledge Transfer. Any questions that would normally have been DM’d to me could be posted there, publicly for all to see. In theory, others could step up to answer these. I could also forward DMs there to respond to publicly or refuse to answer in DM and require them to retype their question in the Knowledge Transfer channel. Rarely did others step up to answer, but it became more like a SoFuckingAgile office hours, which was still a big improvement.

I don't like how you're blaming the author of the article here. My experience is that people, be it from the business or from the Product team or Sales or wherever, are happy to ignore documentation and come directly to the person they see as the knower. You can document all you like, they will still come to you and you are the bad guy if you don't answer them and point them to the wiki.

Do some people exist who don't share their knowledge? Definitely. In fact they are rewarded in many cases because they get whatever they want (usually outside of a higher salary)

However, author wouldn't be writing an article like this if he was happy in that position.

Very few companies and projects die to a singular departure

While I've never seen a company die due to a single departure, I've seen plenty of projects die due to a single departure.

You make a pretty grand assumption here - that OP had time/capacity in all the madness to be able to document things and simply opted not to.

You also gloss over the fact that he addressed this in the article (things were documented, people just kept coming to him anyway).

Kinda seems like the author found a working solution- public email, aka a forum:

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