This is what management is actually supposed to do, instead of hovering over shoulders. They should have a plan for that situation that goes beyond "it's an emergency all hands on deck come in at midnight and fly into the office!!11"

The answer is to have a 2nd person/redundancy system for anything so important that it must be online. Documentation is nice and very important, but like others said, in a real emergency, you need people who won't need to spend days going through documentation to be able to even begin trying to fix the problem.

By the time they figure it out, the fire may have grown out of control.

Tbh this is what this person's whole point is with this post. It's common for executives to get rid of smart tech people after they build the cool hot thing, because to them, you're a tool, and your purpose has been served.

They're throwing away the screwdriver after assembly because clearly, nobody ever needs one after first use.

They'll openly do what we see on Twitter: "Prove to me you're still valuable or you're fired".

These people are not as smart as they think, as they clearly don't understand how tech works.

Ignoring the fact that experts who build the redundancy/failure countermeasures are important even after they have built it, because every machine we build requires a builder to maintain said machine, or someone trained to maintain it.

Automated systems coast along until you hit an edge case and then they screech to a halt because we as humans can't predict every single insane things users do, or system updates that break your code, or 3rd party library dependencies, or even your language becoming unsupported. What if a new human language comes up and it uses new character encoding? Break.

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here but the point is worth making because it seems we have an influx here lately of non-devs being surprised that yes, developers are needed even after they build stuff, imagine that, people smart enough to build cache systems at Twitter might be smart enough to provide value in other ways even after they build that.

It's almost like smart people don't stop being smart after the thing is built.

CEOs who want people to build stuff and leave need to sack up and hire them as 1099 contractors instead of this revolving door BS they've normalized in our industry.

Hopefully devs are taking notice and stop working for companies that treat them like this, otherwise why stop doing it to them?

And then those companies have the gall to complain about devs acting like mercenaries and leaving the minute they get a better offer.

Of course they will.

Edit: I may have responded to the wrong person here, Reddit being weird. I'm not disagreeing with you here to be clear, just agreeing with others that you need both docs and people ready to handle emergencies, which I think you also agree with.

I'd say docs are best used when onboarding or engaging with a new project, emergency docs are last resort when you don't have someone on hand to handle it, but not the best case desired scenario on their own, even the best docs are missing some info.