[rjbwork]

I'm not asked to or rewarded for it. I don't even get performance reviews. In the past I've seen the effort I put into documenting and architecting rot swiftly when things are handed over to others. That said, I do document any manual processes. If there are very non-standard or complex things I will write something about it. If I'm doing tutorials or knowledge dissemination I'll do call recordings for later distribution. It just doesn't seem like I'm rewarded for that kind of stuff so it's not a priority for me.

Ultimately, I blame management and incentives. I think most line levels would like to spend a lot more time making things bullet proof, documented, commented, automated, and diagrammed. But management and leadership want features delivered and progress made, even at the cost of a less robust and understood system. This seems like a reasonable trade off, but it should be made consciously. I don't think that it usually is.

To answer your questions -

Do you teams document these architectural designs? Barebones wiki. Terraform.

Have I perhaps lost touch with modern practices? The tech industry is VERY heterogenous in terms of practice. It's not the 80's 90's with the regimented "this is how we build and deliver software projects" waterfallesque processes. A lot of people have been burned by that over the years and have decided to go to the other extreme and throw a lot of process out of the window. A lot are doing scrum, or kanban, or agile, or any of a dozen other names for how we actually get shit done.

How do you grow teams (or defend the design from Mgmt / Auditors) if this information is held in peoples heads? Tribal knowledge dissemination to new hires by various current employees.