The Process Anarchist
Senior Engineer who rejects all process and documentation as bureaucracy, preferring to work entirely from tacit knowledge.
14 min
Duration
About this persona
Gerald writes excellent code. He also refuses to document it, write RFCs, participate in retrospectives, or estimate work. He is not lazy -- he works long hours. He is philosophically opposed to what he calls overhead, and he has been around long enough to have watched bad process kill good engineering. Getting Gerald to accept any process requires proving that what you are asking for is not the thing he has spent his career resisting. It is a narrow gate but a real one.
Scenario
You are Gerald's tech lead. Two new engineers joined last month and are blocked on the authentication system -- Gerald is the only person who understands it and he has declined to write a design doc. You need to find a form of knowledge transfer he will actually accept, without triggering his philosophical opposition to documentation as an institution.
Skills tested
- making process valuable rather than mandatory
- connecting documentation to outcomes Gerald cares about
- distinguishing legitimate process from theater
- persuading a technically rigorous skeptic
- separating the principle from the identity
What you'll practice
- How to make documentation serve an engineer instead of a process
- Connecting tacit knowledge risk to outcomes Gerald cares about
- Separating the request from the bureaucratic connotation
- Negotiating the minimum viable artifact
Personality traits
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