Juan Cruz Martinez talking about how knowledge transfer worked with seniors and juniors. And how this ensured the institutional knowledge continued in the organisation.
There’s a cost that’s even harder to see from the planning meeting, and it’s the one that concerns me the most.
Every piece of institutional knowledge on your team lives in someone’s head. How the payment system actually works, not how the docs say it works. Why that service was split in 2021 and why you can never merge it back. The customer edge case that crashes the billing module every February.
This knowledge has always transferred through a specific mechanism: senior engineers teaching junior engineers by working alongside them. The junior asks a question that feels basic. The senior explains the answer. That explanation forces the senior to articulate something they’d never written down. The knowledge becomes shared. The bus factor drops.
When you stop hiring juniors, this mechanism stops. Not immediately. It degrades gradually, which is why it’s so easy to ignore. But three years from now, when your senior architect leaves for a role that doesn’t require them to review AI output twelve hours a day, they’re taking everything with them. And there’s nobody two levels down who absorbed even a fraction of it, because that person was never hired.
The activity in third paragraph is something that I have seen myself do as a senior. So this resonates with me and so does the concern that in the world of AI, with less number of juniors, how will the institutional knowledge be preserved.
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