But there's no supply for the people who know your product and codebase except for your existing employees, isn't that the whole point of paying them to stay?
In my experience it's virtually impossible to reach the same level of familiarity with a codebase as the people who originally wrote it. This is not only due to years of accumulated complexity and debt, but also the fact that code simply does not capture business intent completely, let alone correctly or with full context.
This is why projects tend to be put on maintenance mode or rewritten (piecemeal or from scratch) once their original owners are gone. This can be, but isn't always, expensive for the business' owners.
Depends heavily on the company and codebase. I've had situations when there is literally no way to arrive at the correct implementation unless you ask the guy who 8 years ago spent several months analyzing a particular unfixable hardware bug.
The worst case is mass layoffs instead of natural gradual replacement, since entire teams leave with no time to document their area (and little motivation to do so)
Over a period of 6 years, until they reach 30% of the knowledge/velocity of the people who wrote the original thing. /s
Basically the company:
- hires a new engineer on the new market rate so they get up spending extra money
- spends extra time and resources to onboard the new engineer to a fraction of the productivity of the engineer that's had tenure
Over the years, I used to think that companies are taking the hit on money and productivity in order to not have "irreplaceable" engineers. Better have replaceable cogs in the machine rather than important pillars of your company, right? Workers need to know their place, even if it costs you money and productivity.
Nowadays, I just think it's the sheer incompetence and the stubborn insistence of managers in thinking that giving a new engineer the same title as the title of one of your tenured engineers will somehow magically mean they both can do the same things, at the same pace.
I used to think that kind of company behavior was calculated malice, now I believe it's simply brutal stupidity.
That's right. You can just replace all that institutional knowledge and established social network infrastructure for a cost so low it's negligible. Not worth mentioning even.
