Comment by Aurornis
3 days ago
> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work— believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot.
You need some experienced people around, but companies that rely on institutional knowledge to get everything done have always been doomed to fail.
Even before AI, turnover was a real thing. People churn jobs a lot in tech even when the pay is good. They get bored and jump companies, leave to join their friends' startup, or move to another city.
Every company I've worked for that operated on a belief that institutional knowledge was king and documentation and processes couldn't replace it eventually had to face the music when key employees left. Ironically this problem was at its worst at a company that compensated very well, because those key employees would often realize they had enough money to retire early or go take some risky startup job instead of sticking around to be the insitutional knowledge base.
Companies that have too much tribal knowledge obviously do fail. But for a company to run well, some institutional knowledge will be there. And this will be the most subtle and implicit stuff that really isnt feasible to put down on paper. Or even if it is documented, its hard to understand without building alot of context. Even if that context is present in the docs, its not really possible to internalize it without actually seeing things at work.
All that is what takes time to learn and it cant really be eliminated either because thats what is critical for you company to run on