General
Share and discuss tech, products, business, startups, or product recommendations
Start new thread

How much knowledge walks out the door when someone leaves?

by
•
I’ve been thinking about how much company knowledge never makes it into the docs. Someone leaves and all the files are still there. Slack is still searchable. But the reasoning behind decisions and all those “you had to be there” details leave with them. How are you handling this at your company?
16 views

Add a comment

Replies

Best

we're a small team so we haven't lost anyone yet, but this scares me more than most infra risk honestly. the stuff I worry about isn't the code, it's the "why did we rule out X" conversations that happened in a call or a hallway and never got written anywhere. right now our only mitigation is a habit of dropping a one-line "decided against X because Y" comment on the PR or ticket even when it feels like overkill, just so future-us (or someone new) doesn't re-litigate a dead end. doesn't scale past a few people but it's better than nothing.

Honestly, I think your one line rule is smarter than a giant documentation process. Most systems are good at preserving artifacts, but terrible at preserving judgment. Git tells you what changed; the ticket tells you what shipped. Neither tells future you which reasonable options were rejected and why. This is a big part of why I’m working on a team version of Second Brain. I don’t think the answer is asking people to write more. It’s taking those small breadcrumbs, connecting them to the surrounding context, and bringing them back when the same debate starts six months later. The capture habit can stay lightweight. The system around it needs to do the scaling.

 that "bringing them back when the same debate starts six months later" part is the actual hard problem for me. capturing the one-liner is easy, we already do that. the part I don't have an answer for is how the system knows a new conversation is close enough to an old rejected one to surface it, without someone thinking to search for it first. is that similarity matching on the discussion itself, or more tied to the artifact (same file, same ticket area) being touched again?

‘decided against X because Y’ is brilliant.

 thanks - honestly it started as pure paranoia about being asked "wait, didn't we already look at this?" in six months and having no answer. glad it's useful outside my own head too.