Documentation in a corporate environment, or even in something like an open-source project, serves several purposes: to make it easier to get new team members up to speed (which can be used to train replacements, but also serves an expansibility purpose), to reduce coordination overhead, and to make it easier to remember what the heck you were doing after spending five months tasked with something else. Most of these motivations aren’t purely altruistic.
Obviously this is going to be quite different for a solo project, and it does look like the downsides to defection are less severe in situations where you have a unique skillset and your company isn’t expecting a need for other people with the same skills. But the point remains that there are performance-oriented reasons for doing a lot of things the OP describes strictly in terms of affecting your replaceability, and in any case the problematic situations seem too limited for cooperation in their context to be called a major virtue.
Can we agree that f your goals are “don’t get replaced, but help the company grow” it’s a risk-reward tradeoff to do things like documentation? And sometimes documenting won’t help growth at all, and sometimes it won’t affect how replaceable you are?
My point wasn’t meant to be a generalized “documentation NEVER helps”, just that it’s entirely possible for an action to be primarily a risk-of-being-replaced without much personal gain :)
Documentation in a corporate environment, or even in something like an open-source project, serves several purposes: to make it easier to get new team members up to speed (which can be used to train replacements, but also serves an expansibility purpose), to reduce coordination overhead, and to make it easier to remember what the heck you were doing after spending five months tasked with something else. Most of these motivations aren’t purely altruistic.
Obviously this is going to be quite different for a solo project, and it does look like the downsides to defection are less severe in situations where you have a unique skillset and your company isn’t expecting a need for other people with the same skills. But the point remains that there are performance-oriented reasons for doing a lot of things the OP describes strictly in terms of affecting your replaceability, and in any case the problematic situations seem too limited for cooperation in their context to be called a major virtue.
Can we agree that f your goals are “don’t get replaced, but help the company grow” it’s a risk-reward tradeoff to do things like documentation? And sometimes documenting won’t help growth at all, and sometimes it won’t affect how replaceable you are?
My point wasn’t meant to be a generalized “documentation NEVER helps”, just that it’s entirely possible for an action to be primarily a risk-of-being-replaced without much personal gain :)
Yeah, that seems reasonable.