[yamtaddle]

A good secretary (or a bunch of them) and filing cabinets.

You may still not know how to find anything, but they will.

Like a lot of other things, this has suffered from computerization making it yet another small part of everyone's job (which also increases context switching, the amount of shit you need to know and keep track of, and generally makes jobs more stressful) rather than a specialty that's the main focus of a few workers.

The benefit (get to stop paying some employees) is easy to measure, while the harm is not.

[rqtwteye]

"Like a lot of other things, this has suffered from computerization making it yet another small part of everyone's job (which also increases context switching, the amount of shit you need to know and keep track of, and generally makes jobs more stressful) rather than a specialty that's the main focus of a few workers."

Nicely said. I am getting really stressed out how complex things are becoming. It's already hard to keep up with git, Jira, Bitbucket, AWS, k8s, Helm, JS frameworks, databases and whatsoever. But then add hard to use document management systems and f...ed up processes that are mainly designed for management to get nice reports and not for productivity. Now you are a bad developer and you are a bad document management person because it's simply impossible to be good at all this stuff.

I am constantly preaching to management that we need specialized tech writers and specialized devs that are good at their respective. But I guess it looks cheaper to waste time and energy of engineers on stuff they aren't good at.