Documenting is scaling yourself, but also a career choice

January 16, 2022   8 minute read

On the benefits of documenting your work and how it can impact your share of the pie

TL;DR

Documenting your work will reduce the burden of making your work used by others. It will make it easier for others to leverage the knowledge you accumulated and so make the company grow faster. At the same time, it could reduce the perception of how critical you are to the company. By extracting your knowledge and making it easily available you free yourself but also make yourself redundant to an extent.

Documenting to free yourself and others

For quite a while when someone at work asked me to have a meeting to explain how something I was familiar with worked I felt special and important. Now when someone has to schedule a meeting for that purpose I feel like I have failed in disseminating that knowledge.

Eventually, I realized that despite the time spent explaining the same things, again and again, made me feel valued it was also a massive time drain. A time that I should have invested in getting better at being an individual contributor.

After that realization, I started stopping more often to ponder whether it was worth documenting what I was working on. Initially, the decision was simply based on how soon and frequently I expected the thing to change and also how many people would have needed that knowledge. The more I produced documentation and pointed people to it when they were in need, the less frequently I got approached with questions.

This had a rather bittersweet taste. I gained much more time but also started feeling way less critical and important to others. This is probably not that different from how someone should feel after having completely automated his job. Gratified for the achievement, but also redundant, and possibly threatened.

Knowledge strategies in the trenches

This dilemma made me remember two former colleagues of mine who positioned themselves at the exact opposite of the “automate-yourself” spectrum. I am talking about “automating-yourself” because I see documenting as one of the many ways to do so. This is also clearly visible in the push of many startups to drastically cut customer support and hide away the few members left to hold the fort behind walls and mazes of FAQs.

Both colleagues were brilliant, but one put a relentless effort into automating himself, in various ways, including documentation and very approachable code. While the other tried to centralize as much critical knowledge as possible and keep it within himself.

Centralising knowledge

Given the high churn rate start-ups experience, soon enough by centralising knowledge, the second individual started being perceived as a critical asset. Knowledge of certain systems or historical attempts to do something only existed in his head. This centralized and gated knowledge turned him into a golden bottleneck for any contributor.

Others’ ability to contribute is now limited by how many hours a day the knowledge-bottleneck individual has available to distribute his knowledge, as well as his mood to do so. This creates the same latency a slow build or testing suite would create, but its impact is much more magnified. Not being able to extract this knowledge before making an important choice for a project may be the cause of its failure or its delay.

Individuals who really care about their progression and importance in a company may have an incentive to behave this way. It will make it easier for them to be critical, or appear as such, and so get a larger share of the pie. At the same time, this behavior will also make the pie grow slower. Also, this knowledge monopoly may give these individuals enough authority that they won’t feel the need anymore to get better at their job, do their homework and be factually correct to win a discussion. Evidence and competence become accessories. This may lead to non-constructive fights and sub-optimal decisions.

Distributing knowledge

On the other end of the spectrum, the other former colleague was trying to distribute his knowledge through documentation, best practices, standards, and anything that would make it possible to avoid that extra meeting, or conversation. By decoupling the possibility to access his knowledge from the time he had available to distribute through meetings and conversations he effectively scaled himself. The bottleneck has been moved from the time he makes available to how easy is to find and access the resource where the knowledge is stored.

This decoupling also makes the individual more expendable. Documenting extensively makes you give up one of the strategic assets you gained by working for a long time in the same company. At the same time, it allows the individual to free themself from the burden of meetings that create little value and deliver continuously. Also, it removes bottlenecks for others. In most companies, this attitude would shrink your share of the pie, but it should also make the pie grow faster. In good companies, this will probably also makes the layers of management above you prioritize assigning bigger projects to you because you will be faster in delivering them. Because documenting the other projects you worked on made it cheaper to maintain them and easier for others to use them. So, these projects are more likely to be multipliers for others. Some enlightened managers will also dare to say to you can be trusted and therefore the company should invest more in retaining you.

Time taken to write post: 3.5 hours