I "fondly" recall one early job in my career starting with the promoted-from-the-ranks dev lead filling a whiteboard with boxes and acronyms... an overwhelming brain-dump to a newcomer that took hours of time spread over days. By the time I'd sorted out what we really did, months later, I could explain the whole thing to a new hire in fifteen minutes. One easily understood diagram, pointers to the two actually-important directories in our codebase, and some context – and they would be off to the races. Funny enough, I met a number of other people at that gig that thought of their work as "irreducible". One was, to use the recent meme, a "10x engineer" for whom the company maintained a rotating roster[1] of tech writers to follow around everywhere and try in vain to record what the heck they were doing.
[1] "rotating" as in "hired, then fled screaming"
Inexperienced engineers sometimes find themselves in teams which don’t appreciate it. Because confrontation can be nausea-inducing, they sometimes don’t endure the discomfort to insist on it.
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When a customer walks into a restaurant, does he ask about the temperature of the fridge the chicken is stored in? Does he ask if the kitchen is clean and organized? No. Thats the chef’s job to insist on. But the customer does care if his food is late or laden with salmonella.
Likewise, its an engineer’s job to care if she has automated tests and well-structured code.