Elon Musk is playing with people’s lives and destroying his very own *newly acquired* company.
One thing people don’t seem to get from Musk firing most of his engineering staff is the fact that a lot of those people are walking away with YEARS of tribal knowledge. That is experience you will never be able to completely replicate nor completely replace.
These people have been working on the same codebase for 5-10+ years and have developed an invaluable level of expertise. This expertise gives them the edge to fix and tackle issues faster than anyone else with best solution catered specifically for that particular project.
A new engineer may be able to assist with the solution (and thinking outside of the box), which is great but doesn’t happen as often as you would think. That and that outside the box solution would likely need input from the expert anyway.
That knowledge helps them foresee potential bigger issues and gives them the confidence to warn higher-ups and system engineers of why some decisions may not be the best direction. They are the first line of defense when it comes to technical problems.
It often takes several new engineers to make up for the loss of these domain experts. It’s often why many companies will bend over backwards to keep them happy. If they were to walk the company would not only be losing an extremely efficient worker but the knowledge walks too.
And if enough of these domain experts all leave at the same time, there is no procedure on earth that could ever produce an effective knowledge transfer from their ghosts let alone to a bunch of greenhorns.
There would be so much technical debt attempting to reverse engineer everything that the company would experience a HUGE loss both financially and in efficiency. And most of those financial dollars would seep into overhead which is BAD.
To put it in non-software/system engineering terms:
It’s like trying to run a closet the size of a giant Amazon warehouse.
The people who have been working at said closet KNOW where random blouse A234 exists, which room it exists in, if it is hung or put away in a drawer, and what it generally looks like.
They may have forgotten a few details but they can easily look at it and remember how to accessorize it.
They also may know that there is a cute pair of boots that always goes with it from a completely different section of the warehouse. That section of the warehouse is hard to get to and is often disorganized so the trek to and from the area will be difficult but they know this.
That blouse was also last used/worn 5 years ago, but they know it may not fit every body type and may even notice some new tears in it which will need to be sewed quickly.
They also have the confidence and know-how to mention the tears they found, how long it will take them to sew them, and which manager to inform.
If denied the opportunity to sew the tears, they also know how to tell said manager why that might be problematic in the future.
E.g. potential wardrobe malfunctions
A new employee (1-2yrs) will NOT be able to know to do that all that nor as quickly. If you tell them to find dress “A234” and add a scarf to it, they wouldn’t even know where to start (where is it? how can I add the scarf so it doesn’t look awful with the dress? etc.). Even if they are at the company for a year and was the top of their Harvard class, they won’t be as efficient.
That is because tribal knowledge takes YEARS to build up and there is no person that can do it better other than another expert (a coworker) with the same expertise.
That and take the fact that no single developer knows and understands the entire codebase of one project. That’s the entire reason why so many software companies are comprised of TEAMS: to divide and conquer.
