jongleberry

it seems to be the same cycle for everyone now, not based on first usage. I saw a reddit thread on this from someone who had multiple accounts that all had the same cycles

I don’t know the details as I didn’t work directly with him, but from what I understand he was trying to get a sabbatical to figure out some life stuff, but eventually he had to quit, which was not his desired outcome as he needed the income and didn’t have the time to find another job quickly.

Which means you need to find a new employer. There are companies and/or managers out there that don’t have these misalign incentives, encourage best practices (like those in this blog post), and provide psychological safety. They exist.

we had a principal engineer who thought he was very skilled and held critical knowledge and tried to use it as leverage. turns out, everyone else considered that poisonous behavior.

seems like you need to find a job with better management

I'd agree on most points, but like others, 1 & 2 I don't agree with.

Most of my knowledge is useless or irrelevant, so taking the time to document this knowledge is a waste of time. 90% of writing a document is understanding your audience and "document your knowledge" misses that point. Littering documents and code with various tidbits is also not very helpful and probably not worth anyone's time.

Documenting long term plans is also pretty useless. Realistically, anything past 30 days is not going to happen. Documenting your strategy and decision making process may be useful, but your idealistic plans? Probably not unless it's just a few bullet points.

The most important documentation is usually the "why?", which ideally should be written before the project starts. Documentation outside of the scope of in-flight projects (which 1 & 2 seem to be encouraging) are not as important as they can be discovered with a tiny bit of effort.