But this doesn't boil down to "you have to replace the impossible problem of knowledge transfer with infinite employee retention"?
Is that an improvement?
(I'd also argue that I've worked on systems where I've developed a better mental model of the problem than the first-gen people I inherited it from, because I as a maintainer was under less pressure to get anything that worked out the door initially.)
EDIT: and looking at the paper you linked there, https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf , I'm in complete agreement with "the designer's job is not to pass along "the design" but to pass along "the theories" driving the design" - it was always easier as that maintainer to take over a project where people could tell my why not just what.
Yeah, I was going to comment something like this : on a complex project even "first-generation" developers start out something more like """third-generation""" : after all the goal is to solve some problem, and the clients themselves might not even actually know what it is !
Is that an improvement?
(I'd also argue that I've worked on systems where I've developed a better mental model of the problem than the first-gen people I inherited it from, because I as a maintainer was under less pressure to get anything that worked out the door initially.)
EDIT: and looking at the paper you linked there, https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf , I'm in complete agreement with "the designer's job is not to pass along "the design" but to pass along "the theories" driving the design" - it was always easier as that maintainer to take over a project where people could tell my why not just what.