u/Glad_Expression4632

Not an engineering manager, but working as an R&D semicon design engineer. When I say "knowledge gap" i mean when a key person leaves the team, there's a bunch of knowledge that leaves with that person. I felt this firsthand whenever I encounter some flow issues, be it learning the sim flows for the first time or just general tooling questions or even looking for documentations, a lot of the time coworkers give me vague ideas about where to find certain files but it takes me hours to back track until I find the slightest useful information. I also found that most of the useful stuff like design procedures of past projects usually don't exist except in people's heads, so documentations are more like hints. Wondering if this is a common occurrence across different engineering fields? If so, what are something you guys have done to reduce the friction and pain?