Ask HN: How do you manage/share domain knowledge in your company?

13 points by Aitizazk 6 years ago | 3 comments

So I am one of the oldest engineers at this company. and the company grew significantly in the past year. I found myself in situations were everyone is asking for a few minutes to get an understanding of a feature or a piece of code or some service/integration and I find myself spending almost 60% of my time on such requests. So just curious how does different companies manage their internal product/tech knowledge and what does the knowledge distribution mechanism look like.

auslegung 6 years ago |

I recently read about GitLab’s solution ti this, and it was quite intriguing. They have a 3000 page employee handbook, with everything basically since the beginning. They intentionally subscribe to a Slack tier that does not allow them to keep messages for long, which forces them to put things in the handbook. And then I assume the first answer to any question is “look in the handbook”.

So basically, use some documentation that everyone can use, and make it painful not to use it.

samanthalee233 6 years ago | |

I work at GitLab, just started last month. My experience with documentation has not only helped me better learn my role, but its given me the opportunity to contribute to my teams growth within my first weeks. This page helped me learn more about how we use the handbook, it might help others interested in learning more, too: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/handbook-usage/

Aitizazk 6 years ago | | |

Interesting. so how does the process of adding to the handbook look like? lets say you developed a new feature/service. do you add a page there with code references?