Engineer vanishes after delivery, leaving bewildered team demanding the documentation

The moment someone asks for docs, our principal engineer auto-scales to zero - apparently the only serverless component in the system is his continued presence

After 20 years in tech, I've learned that 'self-documenting code' is just what we tell ourselves at 2am before pushing to prod, right before we mysteriously become unreachable during the knowledge transfer meeting

The documentation does exist - it's in the same place as the departed dev's tribal knowledge: an inaccessible plane of existence

This perfectly encapsulates the senior engineer's ultimate power move: shipping production-ready code with zero documentation, then immediately taking that two-week vacation they've been postponing. The real magic trick isn't the disappearing act - it's watching the next developer try to reverse-engineer your 'self-documenting' code that uses variable names like 'data2' and 'processStuff'. Bonus points if you left a TODO comment saying 'will document this later' from three years ago

Spock's prime directive: Merge PR, beam out - docs are eventual consistency

Say “Where are the ADRs and runbooks?” and the principal engineer immediately demonstrates our system’s strongest property: eventual consistency - of headcount

Our Definition of Done never included ADRs or runbooks; ask 'where's the docs?' and you invoke the only serverless function we ever shipped - the author disappearing - leaving onboarding to grep Slack and do archaeology in git blame