Ask HN: An engineer resigns -> How tech companies manage knowledge transfer?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41264901

by ryshbg • 2 years ago

5 18 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

elmerfud2• 2 years ago

I think if you're worried about knowledge transfer when an engineer puts in a resignation you have bigger problems. Knowledge transfer should be an ongoing thing. If you're not paid like a key man you should not be a key man.

Some companies like to be cheap and not hire sufficient number of engineers. Companies are fine understanding redundancy for their hardware and their services etc... They totally failed to grasp it for their employees. That's all fine and good if you're putting in a resignation and giving two weeks or a month notice but often times things are not planned. Family emergencies happen where you have extended times people can be out, grave injuries or death happens or people can just be gone the next day.

So however you plan for those eventualities is the same way you plan for and manage the knowledge transfer on resignation.

ryshbg5• 2 years ago

"Knowledge transfer should be an ongoing thing"

How to make this happen? Any software?

JohnFen2• 2 years ago

This isn't a technological problem, and there aren't technological solutions. This is a human problem. In my opinion, the way you do that is by not allowing people to specialize too much. Everyone should be rotating through duties so that everyone spends enough time dealing with each aspect of the product(s) that the "knowledge transfer" happens constantly and naturally as part of normal day-to-day operations.

JohnFen2• 2 years ago

How do tech companies manage knowledge transfer? In 100% of the companies I've worked at, the answer is somewhere between "poorly" and "disastrously".

You can't do a brain dump of an employee and have it be effective. The key to doing knowledge transfers is to make them unnecessary by making it a built-in ongoing process that people don't even notice.

ryshbg5• 2 years ago

How about create a system for constant brain dump and make it accessible.

Can LLMs help do it?

p1esk3• 2 years ago

What do you mean? How would such a system look like?

navyad• 2 years ago

Most of the companies fail at knowledge transfer as they have very poor documenting culture.

joshi4• 2 years ago

I agree with what a lot of folks here are saying around knowledge transfer is a continuous/on-going process.

Any one-off knowledge transfer will most likely fail. People can't learn actionable knowledge with doing the actions. - That's why we need continuous sharing and doing.

People only look for the artifacts of a knowledge transfer when they need it. When resolving unfamiliar issues, people's first question is: "Has this happened before? How did we resolve it the last time?" It's a simple question but most often its very hard to answer.

The knowledge needed to answer questions like the one above, is mostly manually compiled together and often from memory.

Finally, actionable knowledge is hosted in the same tools as product specs, meeting notes, press releases etc. As a result, creating, finding and following such knowledge is quite hard.

Disclosure: I'm building Savvy(getsavvy.so) to fix a lot of these issues for developers.

BOOSTERHIDROGEN• 2 years ago

In my company, there are some unwritten rules whereby managers typically rotate roles after 3-5 years of working in the same job title.

ryshbg5• 2 years ago

-> Employees switch within 2-3 years. (2 years being the industry average)

-> Most don't even live 1 whole rotation cycle.

-> But they do create substantial dependencies on themselves.

Ask HN: An engineer resigns -> How tech companies manage knowledge transfer?

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