not documenting your work or why you gave me a drinking problem

Disclaimer: I don’t actually have a drinking problem. I don’t have any known addiction as far as I can tell either, which I’m very happy about.

That said, last Friday made me go from a happy sysops to an annoyed/angry sysops. What happened you might ask? Someone left the company and didn’t properly document how to do some of their work. More infuriating even, they apparently didn’t do a very good handover. Why does this affect me you might ask? Well, I work in IT and my job is to help people.

At least… Part of my job is to help people. To a certain extent. What I can say for sure is that nowhere in my job description does it say I have to do their job for them when it comes to documenting how to do something.

But because I’m a good mensch, I still try to browse every single page of documentation that person has created over the years, in the hope of finding breadcrumbs that could at least push me (and the person I’m now trying to help) in the right direction. Why do I find this annoying? Because it takes time. Lots of time. Because their job and what they were doing was not something I had any personal experience with myself, because it was just not my job in the first place.

So please, be kind and document your shit so that people that come after you don’t have to lose hours of their own time figuring out how you did it in the first place.