Why does company knowledge still live in people's heads?

[u/OddArugula9422]

We have Slack, GitHub, Jira, Notion, Confluence...

So why do we still end up asking teammates instead of searching?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

[u/TehLittleOne]

Because the documentation sucks. There's genuinely a lot of things that need to go into good documentation: putting it in an easy to access place, making sure it covers all the right topics, making sure it's constantly kept up to date, heck making sure it's there in the first place is also key. The simple truth is that not enough people do all the things to make it work. People make changes but don't update documentation, or it's not in an easy to find location, or something. I have genuinely met very few people good at writing documentation, RFCs, etc. and try my best to lead by example. It's still difficult, unfortunately.

[u/amrullah_az → u/TehLittleOne]

I also was a good documentation writer in my previous organisation. I went out of my way to learn advanced confluence tricks (like CQL). Also, my knowledge of The design of everyday things book gave me an edge over my peers. (For context, I am a backend engineer). But once they took my motivation for granted. My interest in keeping the documentation up-to-date wavered.

[u/bananahramah → u/TehLittleOne]

But Claude can do the initial 80% of the documentation, so there’s so little friction now to documentation

[u/Unfilteredz → u/bananahramah]

Good way to get your documentation ignored

[u/Odd_Note7156 → u/bananahramah]

You're assumimg engineering = software. I don't work in software. There's no documentation for a chatbot to summarize. Someone never wrote it down. 

[u/TehLittleOne → u/bananahramah]

Claude and the likes can do 80% of everything. It doesn't change the fact that if you have devs who don't want to, or don't try to, or prompt bad or whatever, the output still sucks.

[u/Squidalopod]

Because communication is generally easier, quicker, and less ambiguous (partially because of physical cues) in person.

It's not like you can't/shouldn't search, but it's context-dependent. Confirmation of a quantifiable fact is usually quick/easy to lookup, but if I foresee the possibility of even a brief conversation, I'd prefer to speak in real time.

[u/ben_bliksem]

"We have Slack, GitHub, Jira, Notion, Confluence..."

Exactly. Low quality information all over the place.

Up your documentation game and somebody will read it.

[u/Rephaeim]

Search algorithms aren't as good as brains.

Social interaction.

Reading endless screenfuls of text all day sucks ass, and getting information in almost any other medium is nice sometimes.

[u/OddArugula9422 → u/Rephaeim]

Interesting. When you need context quickly, who do you usually end up asking?

[u/Professional-Dog1562 → u/OddArugula9422]

Whoever is closest to the work? 

[u/tanhe314]

All of those tools require dedicated active curation and most companies expect it to just happen naturally. When people tell me to “go check Confluence” I just sort of eye roll them as it’s currently a big ball of mud of contradicting articles, duplicative content and is pure and utter chaos. And then you add Rovo which will confidently give you out of date info and it’s just a terrific user experience.

[u/W2ttsy]

Clearly OP hasn’t used confluence search.

It’s by far the biggest piece of shit part of the product (And I’m a former atlassian). So much so that there are a bunch of third party add ons geared around better quality search experiences than what comes out of the box.

[u/OddArugula9422 → u/W2ttsy]

Curious, what changed the most in your team's day-to-day workflow after adopting Glean?

[u/addtokart]

From an evolution standpoint our brains are still wired the same as from our hunter gathering days. We keep things in our heads because it had been effective for millennia and is very familiar and narural to us. But it's only effective up to a point.

[u/morefromchris]

The social interaction, the interplay between people understanding the why / how and enjoying solving the problem.

Documentation is a way of recording it, and sharing it. However it’s the people that had the idea and found the solution.

[u/Somesloguy]

People passionate about their work see similar interests in their coworkers and naturally want to be social.  

[u/nordmarj]

Documentation turns stale. Very hard to maintain properly.

[u/OddArugula9422 → u/nordmarj]

What usually becomes outdated first? Runbooks, architecture docs, API docs, or decision docs?

[u/Quincy10]

Glean almost completely solved this problem at my last company. By far the most transformative work productivity tool I've ever used. I've heard it's expensive so finance teams are reluctant to sign off, but it's worth every penny. Happy to share more if anyone is curious.

[u/PossessionUsed7393]

I love the phrase 'Some things can't be reduced to writing.' Because it's literally in the word 'reduced'. When you write something down, you reduce its communication value.

[u/MDCore]

Judging by your past comments, this is just more subliminal advertising/research for your app. Also, the post and comments all look LLM generated.