So much knowledge not being applied Most organisations have a lot of documents and data floating around that hardly ever gets revisited or used. They all have research, reading, and relevant information collecting dust. Stuff that should be informing the decisions and strategies of the company. Some of it sits unread in a knowledge base or a wiki. Some of it lies in the drives of individual employees who don’t have a way to share it productively. So much knowledge not being applied! Except that’s not how we work as human beings. If you haven’t read it, experienced it, and contextualised it, then it isn’t knowledge to you. Knowledge is a quality that people possess, not documents, and the only way to transfer it from one place to another is for people at both ends to apply themselves and make it their own. Baldur Bjarnason, On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software knowledgedocumentationwork
Dependence is more profitable than education A customer who pays—in advance—for service contracts is a more stable income source than a customer who has fully mastered a product's use. Customer dependence is more profitable than customer education. What I find truly baffling are manuals—hundreds of pages long—that accompany software applications, programming languages, and operating systems. Unmistakably, they signal both a contorted design that lacks clear concepts and an intent to hook customers. Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software The design concept documentation
Senior craftsperson A Fragment by Wilson Miner staff.design The thing that you’re talking about though, which I’ve never seen a mature company really have a sustainable space for, is the “senior craftsperson.” They’re not pivoting at some point in their career to saying “I’m going to take what I know and leverage it through other people.” They’re saying “I want to get better infinitely at the thing that I do.” I believe that that’s possible. You see it more in pure-art kind of careers. Like “I’m an illustrator” or “I’m a concept artist” or something, and there’s a need for that person being really fucking good at that one thing, and continuing to do that one thing. I think a lot of people can intuitively understand why that would be really satisfying for someone as a career path. The dual ladder craftwork