That’s exactly the attitude the question was asking about. You have written a few human-decades’ worth of learned experience into a codebase and a wiki, and you

That’s exactly the attitude the question was asking about. You have written a few human-decades’ worth of learned experience into a codebase and a wiki, and you want new hires to look at that stuff first. Sure; I have no problem with that, every company does it because not going elsewhere to learn stuff your organisation already knows (and has recorded extra details about its experience) is obviously good and efficient. But… “a few human-decades of learned experience” is what books are. Not all books are lists of RBTree algorithms! It’s just other people’s experience. The question was whether you think there is value in other people’s experience and what they’ve learned. Apparently your answer is “no”. This is a normal amount of arrogance for a profitable company, but it is still arrogance. It says to me that you don’t know what you don’t know. Being comfortable with identifying and admitting the things you don’t know is the opposite of arrogance and is a good thing to cultivate. Imagine your boss announces they’re going to start hiring in the Philippines to save money. There’s no internal wiki entry for “the time we tried hiring people in the Philippines to save money, and how that went”. You are a manager and your instinct (especially self-preservation instinct) says that it probably won’t work but you don’t know why. What do you do? Does anyone ever say “let me read a book about this and come back to you next week”?