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Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

landley.net

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Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#2
"[...] our group was a mix of people over 55 and under 35, with few in between."

We will be seeing this with nuclear soon. The only people I know that studied nuclear engineering or related fields are in their 60s. The renaissance of nuclear will put these people in high demand and a fresh cohort of young people will be drawn into it.

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#5
The phenomena is hardly industry specific:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

If anything, a factory is a result of the communication structure the organizations culture chose at its launch date.

People wasting each others time with inconsistent documentation... sounds like the place is falling apart. At least get a private LAN wiki up for people that work there... Good luck =3

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#7
post #6

This reminds me of the Saturn V. If I remember correctly, no one knows how it works anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V

Lol, NASA literally left an instruction manual on how to go to space, and return safely. The contributions those folks have made over the years is related to just about everything you depend on these days.

People just choose to ignore the documentation, as there is less political mileage in throwing money into space these days. =3

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#8
> My job now was to smuggle these documents back into the company. I would be happy to just hand them over. But that doesn't make any sense to the company. The company officially has these documents (digitally managed!), and officially I don't. In reality, the situation is the reverse, but who wants to hear that? God knows what official process would let me fix that.

This is beautifully written :-D

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#9
> Oh, and as an external consultant, I'm not allowed to know some of the trade secrets in the documents. [...] I need to smuggle these trade secrets back into the company, so that the internal side can handle them. They just have to make sure they don't accidentally repeat them back to me.

he's not supposed to know things he made and left behind. this all gets me thinking about the difference between the employees and "the company"

the employees are always the company, they embody it, like he used to. but as soon as he retires he's supposed to suddently not-know the secrets of the company? best to laugh at the absurdity

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#10
I could have sworn that I read this before, on a different website. Turns out that I was right according to my notes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111228105122/http://wrttn.in/0...

Previous discussion on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3390719

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3311015

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