[epage]

Maybe I've just dealt with good cultures but I find this a bit cynical. Normally when there have been too few people who knew a section of code, it was because:

- The area of code has a high ramp up, high risk, and few new work incentivizing ramping up on it.

- The curse of knowledge makes it hard for the person familiar with the code to know what is needed for others to understand it. Incentives are needed to encourage learning by others to force the maintainer to better understand how to explain things. This isn't a judgement on the person in their general inability to write code for humans nor is it about obfuscation.

[leghifla]

You need incentives for the maintainer helping others to learn. AND you also need incentives for the others to start learning.

I am living right now this situation where I am the maintainer of a large chunk of code, I would like to have at least a second pair of eyes looking on what I do, but the others are all busy with their own tasks and no one learn from the others.