Those are really stupid managers.

If you don't have docs it's a tough competition between having your more knowledgeable devs re-explaining what they know X times to X new hires, or letting new devs figure it out on their own which is both costly in terms of their time and more importantly, risky as hell.

Bad managers love risk though. Since it usually is a choice between speed now and risk later, it only blows up in your face later, and quite spectacularly, and everyone looks like heroes while they are putting fires out on overtime.

That said good managers probably don't tolerate that shit from bad managers under them and can sniff out a firefighter culture pretty quick.

I guess what I meant to say was, managers that value doc do exist. If they really do, they'll let you know.

Yeah I can't feel good about that kind of stuff anymore (it's the same thing in my field with IaC - Infrastructure as Code). Even if I agree that these are good ideas, it all comes down to being able to treat workers like interchangeable cogs rather than people who can amass knowledge and expertise over time.

Then the dream: that you could sell an entire skeleton of a company with none of the old workers clinging to the bones, and another team of replaceable workers could just slot themselves in place and start making money for investors!

I'm not sure it'll ever get that extreme, but it's not ethics that is blocking it from happening, but material reality.

So yeah, fuck the docs.