> You may really need to know about the whizbang service, but it’s been 4 years since anyone last worked on it and no-one remembers how it works. You’ve now fal

> You may really need to know about the whizbang service, but it’s been 4 years since anyone last worked on it and no-one remembers how it works. You’ve now fallen into the trap of tacit knowledge. This article is bad. What it describes - as others have pointed out - is not "tacit knowledge". It merely describes a problem with lack of documentation. "Whizbang service" can be documented. You can write a diagram laying out the main components, write a small readme on how to build and run locally on against some staging environment, perhaps even having some internal wiki with a internal runbook of what to do when the service goes tits up. None of this would touch on "tacit knowledge". Tacit knowledge is there when I get a stack trace, and I already sort of suspect what happened without having to spend hours digging too deep on why. Or when I see some latency metrics for my service, and my first instinct is checking on Slack for deployments on dependencies. You can try to document those things, but it is a fool's errand - you'll end up with a huge mess of text that will work against the purpose of documentation.