Hacker News Reader

No, it's because people who have a lot of experience with one thing tend to be better at that thing, regardless of how good your documentation is.

View on HN

It's like levels of caching. Having information in someone's head is like having it in an L1/L2 cache. Having documentation is like having the information in RAM. And having no documentation and putting things together from scratch is like hitting a hard drive.

That's an amazing similitude, I must note it down. I reckon the last bit could be even "got to fetch it from the network", since you'll likely have to hit Stack overflow..

To stretch out the metaphor, asking a knowledgeable coworker could be "read from RAM", then documentation could be "read from disk"; or vice versa. But I find having someone to bounce questions off of easier than reading docs

I'm leaving a role where I've been the sole supporter for 5 years of a Windows app written by amateurs. Every antipattern you can imagine if in there.

I compare it to a maze that I've traveled many times. I know my way around the maze, but I don't think the team that I'm KTing this too is going to figure it out.

I predict they're going to just freeze the code and leave any existing bugs as is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com