How to avoid documentation and hoard what you know

Writing something down is an act of surrender and a sign of weakness

If you work in software, you are a knowledge worker. Information and experience are your currency; the more important and rare your expertise gets, the more money you make. You live in a bizarro academia where you aim to gather as much useful information as possible about something that matters and protect this information from spreading.

Documentation is a pointless exercise because it is out of date as soon as you write something down. Documentation is like cleaning up your house when you have kids; it will just get dirty again so why bother?

If it is centralized, then everyone can see it, and if everyone sees it, then it is no longer intelligence but just general information, and then you can’t pretend like you are in the CIA anymore. Because you don’t read documentation, there is a good chance that nobody else would read it either. Better to communicate verbally, in hundreds of emails and thousands of chats instead.

If you share information then other people can do your job, and they will assign you something else. Whatever new thing you are learning will make you a beginner again, likely up against someone more experienced than you are. It would be like a demotion. It is better to ride out this one thing. Hopefully, it stays around.

When people seek your expertise, be helpful but not traceable. Say things like see me about this and then have limited availability because you are playing Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Eventually, they will track you down, and when they do this, offer only verbal advice, speaking in parables primarily, and don’t write anything down in a wiki. If they try to record the video chat, allow them to do so but make the rewatch painful by coughing, telling Dad jokes, playing copyrighted music, and playing animal noises that you found on Youtube while watching play-through videos for Ghost Recon: Wildlands. If they try to use the transcript feature, this is when you get to try out your Bane voice.

If your bad communication seems to work and they seem confused, offer to do the work yourself instead. This further solidifies your expertise; if you are the only one who knows about and can even work on an area of software then there are a few possible reasons:

1. That part of the software is incredibly complex; only people with advanced knowledge and experience can safely work on it.

2. Nobody wants to work on it because it is so unpleasant to work on, but you do it out of the goodness of your heart and/or you are stupid.

3. You are actively protecting it like a dog with a bone.

When given those choices, most people think that #1 and #2 are the reality.

I know a lot more about this and how to do it, but I can’t share it now. See me later for more information.