I'm actually going to be walking them through it in a meeting. I'm a big believer in "bus theory" (aka "lottery theory") where you don't want a single person being the sole repository of certain knowledge, in case they're hit by a bus/win the lottery
That has actually hit us twice in one of my organizations... we have a set of handheld two-way radios that are easy to use but extremely unintuitive to program. Only one person knew how to do it, but screwed up other parts of her job and was removed from staff, taking the knowledge with her.
Her successor figured out how to do it eventually, then he was... let's say "hit by a bus" to spare the messy details, and now no one knows again.
(I know where the resources are to potentially figure it out, but we seem to have a bad record with people who have that knowledge...)
(and anyway, we replaced them with a new set of radios that can be programmed by the supplier, anyone with the image file, or any ham-radio operator with the instruction sheet.)
@AllisonC Me too, but when I try to teach someone regex, non-basic git commands, or how to read the awful PowerShell scripts I wrote, the response is "Ehhh, we'll look at that after you die."
@AllisonC TBF that's an often-preferable approach to reducing bus factor.
The difficulty in programming them is a big part of why we wanted to replace them. They're a closed system, so every time we expanded the network, we had to reprogram every single radio, and currently there's 64 of them.
The new ones are an open system, so less secure (but we don't really need security), but when we expand the network, we only need to program the new ones.
sadly, no; it's the nature of having the closed system, every radio needs to be programmed to recognize every other radio in the system, which is why we need to redo every one of them
Oh god, reminds me so much of my worst job ever... It was a company relying 100% on an decades old in-house software. At the time I started there were 5 software guys (including me) somehow keeping the whole thing alive. One after another all but one left the company, including The Most Knowledgeable Guy Ever because he worked there for 15 YEARS
According to German laws that gave him a 3 MONTHS notice period. So the company had more than enough time to find a replacement and start the process of knowledge transfer. And they failed. So hard. They didn't even start interviews until 2 weeks before the guy was out of the door forever.
These kinds of people are so incredibly, unbelievably valuable that they are virtually irreplacable and they just let him walk
This amount of stupidity and inaction still boggles my mind.
But then again, that was one reason why it was my worst job ever.
@Sarov I do make a concious effort to always see the positive in things. I noticed that something was off in that company within a week and not a single coworker ever even hinted at being happy there. But at least I gained experience at noticing those subtle signs earlier to hopefully avoid a repeat.
