I’ve done about 20 years. And in majority of cases it’s not about “wishing” they could ask a departed employee —people are smart enough to figure it eventually.

I’ve done about 20 years. And in majority of cases it’s not about “wishing” they could ask a departed employee —people are smart enough to figure it eventually. The problem is that having someone to ask would help solve an issue in about 5-minutes to an hour whereas without this ability it becomes a multi-day/multi-week endeavor involving multiple engineers and likely will require a couple of iterations. Management never correctly factor in not only the amount of time required to address an issue but also the opportunity cost of developers that could be making forward progress on other issues rather than picking up slack, etc. And the reason this happens is that metrics for productivity tend to just be random nonsense.