The OP claims that employers don’t value the institutional knowledge that is built up by employeees. I can refute this from my direct experience, which, as I understand, is not atypical for a developer working at a startup.
I worked for five years for MetaCarta, which sold geographic search technology, primarily to government agencies and oil companies. In April we were aquired by Nokia, which runs its own search engine (http://maps.ovi.com/) and wants to improve its local search capabilities. Nokia hired all of the MetaCarta engineers, offering us retention bonuses. In July, Nokia sold the government-and-oil end of MetaCarta’s business to Qbase, a company in Ohio that I had never heard of before, licensing the technology to Qbase and keeping the engineers.
If Nokia had considered the institutional knowledge of MetaCarta’s engineering staff to be worthless, they would have just bought the IP and not given the engineers any particular incentive to stay on.
My company would be lost without institutional knowledge because it (unfortunately) doesn't document things very well and the problem solving methods rely on "tell x to fix it". Somehow we manage to survive when developers start to leave, though, but only after a lot of setbacks and arguing about who the new maintainer is.
I used to work in a situation that couldn't maintain much institutional knowledge: a college IT department with student employees. The students wouldn't work for more than 4 years and buggy or inadequate applications were more often redone entirely in different languages rather than given new maintainers.
Some companies do, some don't. Glad you were in a camp that does. I've known people who were at companies which didn't value that knowledge and would just cut cut cut.
I worked for one, but rather than constantly cutting, they have high turnover and rely on golden handcuffs to keep people -- that they treat like slaves. Their average turnover was 18 months, though in the seniors it was more like a year (long enough to not have to pay back the signing bonus and relocation if applicable).
And the management didn't seem to care; they would just hire more interns... who they treated better than the seniors anyway.
And honestly, the work sucked. It was almost entirely a crapware maintenance job, no engineering, and a staunch resistance to changing anything at all, even the clumsy, buggy, and inefficient Perl-based "solution" that the company relied on for around 70% of its catalog data.
"The OP claims that employers don’t value the institutional knowledge that is built up by employeees. I can refute this from my direct experience"
And I can confirm from my direct experience that institutions don't respect institutional knowledge, but I am coming from the angle of a major corporation, not a startup.
But as I've found, its not the interest of the corporation you have to worry about, its the career aspiration of that corporations representative.
I worked for five years for MetaCarta, which sold geographic search technology, primarily to government agencies and oil companies. In April we were aquired by Nokia, which runs its own search engine (http://maps.ovi.com/) and wants to improve its local search capabilities. Nokia hired all of the MetaCarta engineers, offering us retention bonuses. In July, Nokia sold the government-and-oil end of MetaCarta’s business to Qbase, a company in Ohio that I had never heard of before, licensing the technology to Qbase and keeping the engineers.
If Nokia had considered the institutional knowledge of MetaCarta’s engineering staff to be worthless, they would have just bought the IP and not given the engineers any particular incentive to stay on.