You are in a specific situation as working in a very small company. I guess this kind of stuff apply while the company has a quite small IT department; I mean for the specific of password etc. At least in a big company few people would have the problem and they would share the info.
Still the documentation aspect and in general knowledge sharing is important. as working in a bigger company (11K people roughly) with more than half on IT, our situation is different.
In a sense it occurs all the time. People leave for another company (you might too) or simply they change team, get promoted and so on. So documentation is important, but honestly not so many people even think to read it so we try to compliment that with knowledge sharing, to ensure any specific type of task, code, methodology, whatever is known by 2,3 people at least, ideally much more.
But actually, even if nobody is unique and everybody can be replaced easily; the most value you or me have for our company is not what we did and what we know, but what we will do tomorrow and for the years to come. A skilled employee, that think well, know the internal politics, the business etc is extremely valuable. He will take the right decisions, do the things efficiently and work well with others, teammates, boss, clients, whoever. That what give the most value to your company.
What ever you do, you are dependent on the new employee replacing you to be at least decent at his job... And in you case, as you seems to be at least devops and manage everything by yourself, you need a similar profile... Maybe not so easy to find.
I'm a small business programmer. I love solving tough problems with Python and PHP. If you like what you're seeing, you should probably follow me here on dev.to and then checkout my blog.
You're right, big companies deal with these issues differently than small companies. My experience in small companies has been that people rarely commit resources to continuity planning because there is always something seemingly more urgent going on. But if someone critical to the company dies or leaves suddenly, its very existence can be threatened.
Nobody thinks to read your documentation? That strikes me a strange. Is your documentation useful/helpful? Or is it verbose, out of date, misleading, etc., etc.?
Finding talented software devs/IT people with the range of skills required to succeed in a small business is always a challenge. And small businesses don't have the resources to invest in huge amounts of training so hiring is a perennial problem.
For the documentation reading, even when it is available and quite decent, I noticed that some people still don't read it.
This include doc of official recognized libraries with honestly very good doc. And of course it is the same for internal documentations.
Some people just don't have the "hook" to look for documentation. Maybe a part of that is they worked on projects or company/whatever where the doc was not that helpful but I think also they may take the habit to ask colleagues instant, and that fine, you gain time, but only to a point. If you want to grow yourself, you also need to know way to do things yourself.
I'm a small business programmer. I love solving tough problems with Python and PHP. If you like what you're seeing, you should probably follow me here on dev.to and then checkout my blog.
Sometimes these things are more complicated than they first appear. It could be a habit, like you say, or there could be hidden benefits to asking for help instead of just reading the documentation. Being on the outside, I could only speculate.
Cheers.
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You are in a specific situation as working in a very small company. I guess this kind of stuff apply while the company has a quite small IT department; I mean for the specific of password etc. At least in a big company few people would have the problem and they would share the info.
Still the documentation aspect and in general knowledge sharing is important. as working in a bigger company (11K people roughly) with more than half on IT, our situation is different.
In a sense it occurs all the time. People leave for another company (you might too) or simply they change team, get promoted and so on. So documentation is important, but honestly not so many people even think to read it so we try to compliment that with knowledge sharing, to ensure any specific type of task, code, methodology, whatever is known by 2,3 people at least, ideally much more.
But actually, even if nobody is unique and everybody can be replaced easily; the most value you or me have for our company is not what we did and what we know, but what we will do tomorrow and for the years to come. A skilled employee, that think well, know the internal politics, the business etc is extremely valuable. He will take the right decisions, do the things efficiently and work well with others, teammates, boss, clients, whoever. That what give the most value to your company.
What ever you do, you are dependent on the new employee replacing you to be at least decent at his job... And in you case, as you seems to be at least devops and manage everything by yourself, you need a similar profile... Maybe not so easy to find.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Nicolas.
You're right, big companies deal with these issues differently than small companies. My experience in small companies has been that people rarely commit resources to continuity planning because there is always something seemingly more urgent going on. But if someone critical to the company dies or leaves suddenly, its very existence can be threatened.
Nobody thinks to read your documentation? That strikes me a strange. Is your documentation useful/helpful? Or is it verbose, out of date, misleading, etc., etc.?
Finding talented software devs/IT people with the range of skills required to succeed in a small business is always a challenge. And small businesses don't have the resources to invest in huge amounts of training so hiring is a perennial problem.
For the documentation reading, even when it is available and quite decent, I noticed that some people still don't read it.
This include doc of official recognized libraries with honestly very good doc. And of course it is the same for internal documentations.
Some people just don't have the "hook" to look for documentation. Maybe a part of that is they worked on projects or company/whatever where the doc was not that helpful but I think also they may take the habit to ask colleagues instant, and that fine, you gain time, but only to a point. If you want to grow yourself, you also need to know way to do things yourself.
Sometimes these things are more complicated than they first appear. It could be a habit, like you say, or there could be hidden benefits to asking for help instead of just reading the documentation. Being on the outside, I could only speculate.
Cheers.