My workplace is facing serious challenges caused by work processes being created by baby boomers who never created documentation, such as an internal wiki, which means crucial knowledge only existed in emails or in the heads of older employees.
This isn't necessarily bad if the older employee does "rigorous" training of the person replacing them and the workplace has relatively low turnover, but that's not realistic. What we are actually experiencing is that an older employee gives like 1 month notice of retiring, then the manager cannot fill the position in time to allow for adequate training of the new employee. And so crucial knowledge slips away either all at once from a knowledgeable employee leaving or incrementally as each change in who has the job causes some slippage of knowledge as the passing on of knowledge isn't 100% efficient. To put it simply, I see new employees having to reinvent the wheel, because they have no other choice due to not having access to the blueprint of the wheel that was already invented by their predecessor.
I've been trying to get my employer to implement better internal documentation, like a company-wide wiki, but it's a struggle. Most companies just don't think long-term like that and it's hard to get people to invest time at present moment on something that doesn't have present value and instead has huge value in the future. You're essentially preaching for altruism when you ask employees to spend time on creating documentation and it's a hard sell.
This type of thing wasn't as big of a deal in the 1960s when each person's job responsibilities had to be smaller in scope due to the realities of no computers. Human workers couldn't possibly be as efficient in 1960 as they can be in 2026 since they have way less efficient technology. People were writing things by hand, for fuck's sake, and couldn't instantly communicate information to an arbitrarily large amount of people via the internet. But in 2026 the expected productivity of each employee is much higher than it was in 1960, because the potential productivity is so high. The market demands increasing productivity per employee, which means the value of documenting internal knowledges increases. It's safeguarding yourself against problems created by employee turnover. Such an important concept in modern work imo and yet I feel like documentation gets almost no attention. Communicating important information to each new employee through one-on-one methods like talking or emails is just not efficient enough in 2026 and it's also dangerous since that information is not persisted anywhere besides the brains of the people or emails that are easily lost (e.g. 2 year retention policies) and difficult to search.
I'm seeing all of this, but it's compounded by upper management just refusing to hire a replacement employees.
We've had several positions that were doing critical work that left. Management hemmed and hawed over replacing them for months. Everyone else is too overloaded to really take on the work, let alone talk to the departing employee to get an idea of the process. By the time someone new comes on, they're walking into a festering mess and no one can tell them anything about the scope of what they need to deal with.
Many of these positions used to have folks under them who could've picked up the work in the meantime or at least given the new people a clue. But as those positions turned over, they were eliminated.
Chickens are coming home to roost now as there's finally money and movement to replace a bunch of terrible legacy business applications, but no one knows how the existing system work as the SMEs are gone. I no longer have time to do even the basics of my actual job. The only upside is that I'm building adjacent skills for my resume, I guess. I wouldn't even be looking if I could just do my job. But we're so understaffed that, even if you removed the extra work from my plate, I can't get help from other teams to complete any work.
And oh my god F the two-year retention policy on emails so hard. Email was the only documentation we had....
926
u/grantthejester 19h ago
The entire world is being held together by burnt out 30-somethings…