Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues.
The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
It's one of the most consequential problems imaginable to solve, particularly as the US begins to realize that we need to compete with decades of China's subsidized energy and industrialization/manufacturing capacity.
Taking it a level deeper, what most don't realize is that infrastructure is an asset class: before someone funds the construction of $100M of solar technology, a developer will spend 2-5 years developing 15 or so major commercial agreements that enable a lender/financier to take comfort that when they deploy such a large amount of cash, they'll achieve a target yield over 20+ years. Orchestrating these negotiations (with multiple "adversaries") into a single, successfully bankable project is remarkably difficult and compared to the talent needed, very few have the slightest clue how to do this successfully.
Our bet at Phosphor is that this is actually solvable by combining natural language interfaces with really sophisticated version control and programming languages that read like english for financial models and legal agreements, which enables program verification. This is a really hard technical challenge because version control like Git really doesn't work: you need to be able to synchronize multiple lenses of change sets where each lens/branch is a dynamic document that gets negotiated. Dynamically composable change sets all the way down.
We are definitely solving this at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and we're actively hiring for whoever is interested in working at the intersection of HCI, program verification, natural language interfaces and distributed systems.
As a tech writer people have a lot of experience but they never turn it into institutional knowledge because it’s never written down. Ay best it’s tribal knowledge passed by word of mouth.
I know some people refuse to document things because they are hoping for job security but that never happens. Or sometimes for revenge for getting rid of them. But many companies survive despite those efforts.
There's always a lot of talk about how documentation is important, but there's never budget for a tech writer (well, you must have found some, as you've taken tech writer as a title, but it's not often available) or a documentation maintainer.
> What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary…
>> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain.
> It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that
>> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.
Wouldn't have been that unusual in 1972 when nearly all the canals including that one had ceased commercial operations and many of them had been intentionally drained either. I suspect the transition from the canal being infrastructure maintained by locally-stationed full time professionals to a pleasure cruiseway which the new waterways board was willing to devote a bit of time to maintaining only after the previous one had spent several years trying to get it shut down probably had as much impact as the Blitz on the work crew having no idea about plugholes...
Institutional memory is not information or documents - it's people.
Every single real-world process has implicit knowledge. And you can't always capture that knowledge of paper.
But, many corporations seem to want to get rid of their most experienced people to save money and have better quarterly results for the stock market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Solid writing.
This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.
If you build the sort of culture where people hang around, they will occasionally have time to tell each other the internal folklore. "When I started, an old guy told me about the plug under the canal".
People who work with software know this. Yeah, there are documents describing the system. No, reading them does not mean you understand the system.
Alas, it's an intangible, and doesn't get counted with the rest of the beans.
From 50 - 1000 employees things worked very well. There was a great deal of continuity in the relationship. Lots of trust and flexibility in both directions. Our product quickly became the best available, by a long margin, and for a couple decades.
But after they passed about 1500 - 2000 employees they got more organized. A formalized organization and process system. Things quickly went downhill. As someone working from outside the company, their processes were incredibly disruptive and inefficient for me. Likewise, their turnover replaced a situation of working with long time friendly colleagues, who knew me very well, to working with people who had no idea what my positive reputation was, my track record of delivering quality without the hammer of conformance, etc.
The project's ambitious upward trajectory stalled. Even then it took about ten years to fall behind other players. But it never recovered. Today it operates deep in the shadows of others.
Virtually every employee I worked with was wonderful, inclined to be as supportive as restrictions allowed, etc. But the institutionalization smothered the organizations ability to operate with any flexibility, no matter how dysfunctional or value destroying the results.
The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories.
You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
One thing I notice is it's very easy to add additional layers of relatively small actual value that look like lots of value. So you might say you've earned a degree of respect by working consistently for years, and people don't mind that you don't always update your status reports. But then if you don't defend vigorously in the org, someone might come in who does very little work in terms of company output, but always gets your status reports in and reports up the chain so you "don't have to". And that looks like value to the person above, but it wasn't really. And now you have a new boss.
freedomben•2h ago