I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
I think there&#x27;s something else that&#x27;s necessary that doesn&#x27;t align well with the things in the article, and which is currently lacking in my current work environment, but which is kind of hard to describe succinctly.<p>Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented.  In order to get stuff done you have to have a social network of people who know how to do the things you need to do, and know all the secret tricks.  The right environment variables to set.  The right arguments to pass to simulators.  How to find the important bit of data buried webapp developed by people who apparently like to invent new words for old concepts.  I get a lot of terse autogenerated emails that probably mean something to somebody, but not to me, and don&#x27;t have human return addresses or really any way to discern the context of where they came from or why.  A lot of tools use domain-specific configuration languages that are usually just python scripts that call a bunch of functions that are defined elsewhere and have no documentation.<p>These things might be reasonable in a startup with a dozen people, but we have over a hundred thousand.  My opinion is that once an organization is a certain size, everything really needs to be written down and easily accessible.  I shouldn&#x27;t have to regularly ask people how to do basic things, it should be on a wiki.  If it&#x27;s complicated, it should be in a training video, or a user manual.