Glossary
By Glue Team
Tribal knowledge is information that lives only in people's heads. It's not written down. It's not documented. It's lost when that person leaves.
In software development, tribal knowledge is expensive.
You have a critical module. Only one engineer understands it. They're the bottleneck for any changes. If they leave, you're in trouble.
Or you have architectural decisions that made sense 3 years ago. Everyone knows why they were made — except new engineers, who think the architecture is broken.
Or you have a production incident that happens every 6 months. The fix is a specific sequence of commands that only one on-call engineer remembers.
That's tribal knowledge.
Onboarding takes longer. New engineers need to learn from people, not docs. That's 2-3 weeks slower.
Decision-making is slow. You can't make architectural decisions without talking to the engineer who originally designed it.
Risk is high. When the tribal knowledge expert gets sick, retires, or leaves, you lose critical information.
Changes are risky. Without understanding why something was built a certain way, modifications are scary.
Innovation is limited. You can't try new approaches because you don't fully understand the current system.
Engineers write code, not docs. Docs are boring. Code is real. Under deadline, documentation gets skipped.
Also: Engineers don't know what information is tribal knowledge. They think "everyone knows why we use this library." But new hires don't.
Write one-pager for each major system:
Takes 2-3 hours per system. Saves weeks of onboarding.
Keep a decision log:
Future engineers will thank you.
For critical operations:
Runbooks prevent knowledge loss when people leave.
Make sure 2-3 people understand critical systems, not just one. If person A knows authentication, teach person B too.
Glue automatically extracts tribal knowledge from your codebase. It reads the code and generates documentation about what you actually built.
This doesn't replace written documentation. But it captures knowledge that lives in code, automatically.
Ask these questions:
Every "no" is a gap. Prioritize filling the biggest gaps.
Treat tribal knowledge like technical debt. Every quarter:
Over time, tribal knowledge becomes documented knowledge. Your org becomes more resilient. Onboarding gets faster. Decision-making gets quicker.
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