> The most useful technology is not intellectual property in the form of written documents, but the unwritten knowledge in people’s heads.<p>It's interesting how often companies try to treat Software engineers as fungible resources. That has always seemed to me to be ignoring the very real cost of understanding the task at hand.<p>At least at my current (FAANG) employer, I see a lot of process optimizing for the relatively high turnover common in tech. Some of this is for maintenance purposes, but there are generally only a small number of choices for technologies to use to solve any given problem, which typically means that expertise in the common internal stacks is relatively transferrable between projects.<p>My team is in the B2B space, and I have found that every new team member takes a long time (at least a year) to gain an acceptable grasp of the business complexities which our clients are already experts in. It feels like this problem is endemic in tech companies where products are routinely built and replaced without fully understanding the problems being solved. I feel like if Software Engineers stayed in the same product space for longer this might begin to be less of a problem.<p>Curios if this matches other's experience.