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Institutional Memory and Reverse Smuggling
An anonymous reader writes "Anyone who's worked in a large engineering firm is familiar with institutional amnesia. Things get built, and then forgotten. Documentation is supposed to help, but rots, is lost, or uses obsolete methods and notation nobody understands anymore. I recently found myself in a strange position, rehired as a consultant with the unofficial job of reminding the company how an old plant works. I even have some personal copies of documents they seem to have lost, which I have to awkwardly smuggle back in. I don't find these kinds of experience written about often, but I'm convinced they're more common than you'd think."
But the NDAs keep me and everyone else involved from talking about it. :P
If the history channel read this story, they would undoubtably conclude that the plant was built with the help of aliens.
Until you write it in cobol.
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You guys have it easy. Sometime when I write a comment I for-SQUIRRELS!
Maybe if the company had given itself a name it would have been easier for it to keep track of information.
.sig withheld by request
I have a situation a liitle more strange. A customer of a former employer (now twice aquired) has asked me to act as a customer advocate on a system I wrote as they have "limited" confidence in my former employer being able to maintain the system and the NDA/Non-Competes/IP Ownership prevent me working on the system for the customer.
Speaking from experience, corporations are unable to give themselves just one name. They have to change their names regularly (because it obviously makes things better, like go faster stripes) and more, they have to change the names of departments even more regularly (again because it improves everything). The result is that any documentation system which is created rapidly becomes fragmented, out of date and lost as the paths to the documents are changed to match the names.
The conclusion is that using names only makes things worse.
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Years ago people solved this problem but they didn't document their solution well, so here we are again.
I know a guy who, after the company was bought, got the ax along with every other engineer in the place.
As he was working remotely, he had a local copy of the entire repo. With his severance check was a reminder to "destroy all company information in his possession".
Fortunately, he didn't do that because, 2 months later, they came back asking if he had gotten around to doing that because the salesdroids accidentally sold off the main repo server when they liquidated the office equipment.
He greatly enjoyed negotiating the fee for "recreating" the repo that he "didn't have".
Were the plans for two very tall buildings, side by side, with everyone trying to figure out how they both fell after being impacted on the upper stories by a few measly tons of kerosene?
(O.k., mod me down. Then go watch American Idol again.)
I left a company 6 months ago and they are now rebuilding the system I build because the new guys can't figure out how it works. When I started there 2/12 years ago I rebuilt the current system because I couldn't figure out how it worked...
A post at bash.org: