A few jobs ago I was a Work Study in college, and I was the head of IT’s assistant. He was in charge of the PBX phone system along with the network and workstations.
We had to do some desk juggling and rather than change assignments in the PBX we decided to just move the cables that connected the patch panel from the desk sto the PBX. Easy right? Nope. My boss’s predecessor when he set up the PBX system, along with all of the other patch panels to labs and offices didn’t document anything. He also used 15 foot cables when a 1 foot cable would have worked, but that’s a rant for another day.
My boss and I spent 20 hours over the course of a weekend documenting which ports on the patch panel matched which port in which office. 40 man-hours wasted because my boss’s predescor didn’t take a few minutes to document as he set everything up.
This kind of behavior is hard for me to wrap my head around. And my PBX example above isn’t an isolated experience. It seems that non-documentation like this occurs in IT departments across the country. It appears to be a mixture of pure laziness this and a “If I know everything, I’m irreplaceable” mentality.
SPOILERS: Everyone is replaceable.
The replacement may not be better, but everyone is replaceable. Case in point, Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, retired from the Bulls twice. After both times, the Bulls had to find another guy to start at Shooting Guard. Were either of them as good as Jordan? No, not at all, but they were his replacement.
My advice is this: You’re not going to be at your current job forever, so do yourself and everyone else a favor and document everything. I use a mediawiki install for personal stuff, but even if its just a collection of Word docs in a network share, find something that works for you and run with it.