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Comment by yamazaki | Hacker News Reader

Agreed that Elon is making Twitter iterate and ship much faster, but not sure the price he is paying in loss of "tribal knowledge" will be worth it at the other end.

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I have no opinion on Musk or Twitter and know nothing about the organization of Twitter, but IMO "loss of tribal knowledge" is a polite way of saying "lack of documentation" because a few people held knowledge in hostage in order to increase their prestige and status.

Documentation has limits. It’s not like you come out of med school ready to be a doctor. There’s certain types of knowledge most easily modeled by the search engine in your head. Heck the information may even be written down! But in a multi systems failure which page of documentation from the 18 different involved services do you read to figure out how to bring it back up?

Do you think someone brand new to a team with documentation in hand will be as effective as someone who’s been there a year?

> Do you think someone brand new to a team with documentation in hand will be as effective as someone who’s been there a year?

Isn't that the purpose of good documentation?

Imagine a plane pilot with lot of experience taking a new job, does they need one year to train before taking passengers on flight?

I guess are we talking the pilot or mechanic? And is the mechanic working on a plane that is expected to function completely differently year to year?

I mean if I’m running sql then yes I expect someone with experience in sql to be able to onboard quickly to be able to execute sql queries.

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