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No, it's because people who have a lot of experience with one thing tend to be better at that thing, regardless of how good your documentation is.
by tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
No, it's because people who have a lot of experience with one thing tend to be better at that thing, regardless of how good your documentation is.
- justin_oaks 4y agoIt's like levels of caching. Having information in someone's head is like having it in an L1/L2 cache. Having documentation is like having the information in RAM. And having no documentation and putting things together from scratch is like hitting a hard drive.
- toyg 4y agoThat's an amazing similitude, I must note it down. I reckon the last bit could be even "got to fetch it from the network", since you'll likely have to hit Stack overflow..
- bsurmanski 4y agoTo stretch out the metaphor, asking a knowledgeable coworker could be "read from RAM", then documentation could be "read from disk"; or vice versa. But I find having someone to bounce questions off of easier than reading docs
- waltbosz 4y agoI'm leaving a role where I've been the sole supporter for 5 years of a Windows app written by amateurs. Every antipattern you can imagine if in there. I compare it to a maze that I've traveled many times. I know my way around the maze, but I don't think the team that I'm KTing this too is going to figure it out. I predict they're going to just freeze the code and leave any existing bugs as is.