> there shouldn't be any master in the team who holds the keys to the knowledge kingdom
that's exactly what i'm disagreeing with. It sounds like a good feature on paper. In reality, it seldom is. Most east coast companies of significant size, if they do anything sufficiently complex, will have 1, sometimes 2-3 guys, who hold the keys to the kingdom & know everything. The kind of domain knowledge that cannot be transferred in kt sessions. In all the IBs I've worked at, there was always the point person who knows everything about one thing, & if he got hit by a bus, man you were in serious shit. Its just the cost of doing business in that domain, can't really derisk it by writing everything down.
otoh most Valley firms do very generic shit, with young troops recruited every so often, who stay just long enough to make the jump to the next faang. Even in the Valley, you have L8,L9s whose disappearance can cause significant damage. Its simply not possible to transfer all knowledge to rank and file. some things are just very hard. Code has a way of getting very convoluted very fast. End of the day, SWeng is a very young field. There are no rules like multiple people must know your codebase. There are actual prop funds in chicago running out of 1 big R file written by the cofounder. Whole fund runs out of a single R program! No joke. Big world out there.
I think the point you are missing here is documentation. There’s no reason to have all the bus-factor — it’s just laziness on the part of organizational structuring and lack of mandate to create quality infrastructure with good documentation, you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 to do this. Spoken as a catfish programmer who spent many years repairing the products of “rockstars” after they fucked off to wherever they went. Also if your stuff is too “complicated” to write down that’s a smell — people have documented far more complex pieces of tech than any software only shop has created look at medicine field or any mechanically engineered system. People love to make excuses about not writing stuff down, turns out you only have yourself to blame once you pull the trigger on your foot gun. Also your characterizations of the East and west coast are criminally juvenile — I’ve worked on both coasts and in Europe, sure there are a few orgs like you say all over the world, those are the ones where the contract is not worth the headache of dealing with an org that can’t tell their own asshole from a hole in the ground because “it’s in jimmys head”
that's exactly what i'm disagreeing with. It sounds like a good feature on paper. In reality, it seldom is. Most east coast companies of significant size, if they do anything sufficiently complex, will have 1, sometimes 2-3 guys, who hold the keys to the kingdom & know everything. The kind of domain knowledge that cannot be transferred in kt sessions. In all the IBs I've worked at, there was always the point person who knows everything about one thing, & if he got hit by a bus, man you were in serious shit. Its just the cost of doing business in that domain, can't really derisk it by writing everything down. otoh most Valley firms do very generic shit, with young troops recruited every so often, who stay just long enough to make the jump to the next faang. Even in the Valley, you have L8,L9s whose disappearance can cause significant damage. Its simply not possible to transfer all knowledge to rank and file. some things are just very hard. Code has a way of getting very convoluted very fast. End of the day, SWeng is a very young field. There are no rules like multiple people must know your codebase. There are actual prop funds in chicago running out of 1 big R file written by the cofounder. Whole fund runs out of a single R program! No joke. Big world out there.