Allright, here goes:
I've recently joined a new company. Ofc that entails learning a lot of things, getting to know people, finding out how they all operate etc.
I work a desk job where knowing details of how things are done in the company help a lot. So I look for documentation. For people who've been there for long and/or have been working with the systems I'm interested in. So I ask around for docs and people, then ask them for more docs and more people and so forth. Now with regard to docs, as you might also have encountered before, the situation can be anywhere from meticulously maintained manuals to poorly written wrong stuff. Or not be there at all because [person left the company/someone "organised" the files/dog ate it/job security]. In this company that's from well into the last century, there's "a bit of everything and something for everyone, 9/10" - IGN. One older guy who's been with them told me some about their whack history including some (CN: mortality) near-death experiences for the company, one of which involved one guy with the audacity to just fucking dying from cancer on rather short notice. He was basically the architect, central to many important processes and basically a huge liability the company never bothered to mitigate. Some other guy who wrote wery good documentation was let go of and after a while his documentation got outdated, lost, and some parts possibly deleted and never found again despite multiple backups and many ppl searching. There doesn't even need to have been malicious intent, the company infra is so fractured. Ppl save(d) files locally. On net shares. On net shares some ppl held on their individual workstations. Various cloud storages. Datacenter storage. Inside some SaaS. And the company also has a ton of minor external sites (physical properties, not websites) often with their own server(s). Oh and remember sharepoint? Yeah. I hope you understand the situation but let me summarise: a clusterfuck. It has gotten better in recent years but a lot of that shit is still around. With seemingly every attempted migration, some things were kept back. They are very good at introducing a system without phasing out the old one. This is seen throughout e.g. in their software (bye survey_tool_A, survey_tool_B is my new friend now but wait actually I'll still use you for... Employee satisfaction surveys specifically), the way they hire people (and don't do the handover, often instead just transferring sb's files from some sources to their manager and that has its own hellhole of pitfalls but not least of all who tf can clean that up and e.g. reshare all the relevant files with the respective ppl), managing hardware ("yeah for xyz I need to keep my old [some outdated windows version] workstation, and if it ever dies we have a huge problem but hopefully I'm dead before that and for most things I can actually use this new laptop ig"), etc so it's somewhat noticeably a culture problem I'd wager. And "company culture eats any kind of strategy for breakfast", as HR professionals like to cite some smart person. So what are you to do as a new hire? You basically have a (company) patient with a complex personality disorder and amnesia. I feel like I'm basically the fluoxetine they gave the company to combat some of the sympoms.
So yeah, I'm curious to see where this goes. Maybe this is all just normal and I'm being oversensitive to the organised chaos. I've not necessarily seen worse, but also often not much better and they did survive for all this time so it can't all have been wrong. Oh and the pay is reasonably good, so yeah I'll give them a shot 😌