A solvable problem?

I’m not sure what the moral to this story is.

Better organization and document management could solve some of the problems. But attempts to fix corporate document management also caused some of them, so one has to be careful. We might’ve had better luck if more of the physical office libraries still existed. We only retained some of the documents because one of them did.

Memory of techniques and importance is even harder. Maintaining a continuous gradient of ages in the company probably helps, so you don’t fall off a memory cliff when one cohort of employees retires.

But maybe engineering archaeology will always exist. The more I look around, the more the engineering world, once you go back more than a few years, looks like subterranean New York City. A mass of strange engineering feats humming away out of sight, produced by long-forgotten ancient peoples, leaving only fragmentary maps and diagrams.

—An engineer, 2011-12-04