There is No Manual is more than memoir. What is past is prologue, and what once characterized only disorganized or highly dynamic companies is the norm. You will probably be responsible for training yourself on your next job. If there’s any training material at all, it’s probably out of date at best, and missing critical sections at worst.
Work is Hell
This is a deplorable situation. It’s hell for the kind of employee who wants to do a good job but who isn’t familiar with the terrain, or who came from a highly directed school situation, or who comes from a milieu that, like most Asian countries, values conformity and rigid adherence to well-established standards. It’s deplorable, but guess what: this is your life. Deal with it.
I say this with love, because it is a recurring theme in my life. I would have advanced much farther in my technical careers if I had simply accepted that there just wasn’t a handy-dandy central repository of goodness into which I could occasionally dip the ladle of my ignorance. It was always my secret expectation that, given my proven willingness to work my tail off learning whatever needed to be learned, there should be some kind of easily accessible and complete set of references or tutorials around to help me excel in whatever job I happened to be doing at the time.
In isolation, this sounds reasonable. In the 21st century, it is simply not feasible. In the 1950s technology was changing rapidly but a war-trained generation had learned to map out all contingencies carefully and document every course of action required of the rank and file. Bureaucratic, sure, and turgid, most certainly, but distinctly comforting to me today. If you were assigned the task of operating a tank turret or programming an IBM mainframe you’d be shown a giant looseleaf binder somewhere, with hundreds or thousands of pages of typewritten instructions and crude illustrations. You could therefore become good at your job literally by reading the book.
When Life Gives You Lemons, Start a Wiki
Technology is infinitely more complex now. That book would be even more useful now. The problem is that things are changing so quickly that a cohesive orchestration of complex activities from overture to A section to B section to conclusion is now impractical to create. By the time draft 1 is finished for version 1.0, version 3.0 is already in development. By the time draft 2 is approved by management, edited, and published, whole feature sets are changed beyond recognition, incompatible as documented, or deprecated in favor of a new technology.
All of this is a golden opportunity for you. It is now possible to create a wiki (community-written documentation, of which Wikipedia is obviously the most prominent example), shared Google document, or blog with zero technical knowledge. You can put up a wiki or blog yourself and use it to stitch together a patchwork quilt of tutorials, tips, reference guides to cover the most common aspects of your job. This will invariably find its way to grateful consumers, maybe even your own boss, who will then begin to regard you as an expert in the field whether you are or not. It will also make you more productive because you spend less time searching for, bookmarking, or being frustrated by obsolete websites.
Turn this difficult situation into a branding opportunity for Brand You. It’s a long-term career investment that could pay off richly.
