I've worked with the kind of developers who try to gatekeep their knowledge and the systems they work with. I find that a few of the following conditions tend to hold:
* They're not very good developers and not very smart and probably somewhat cognizant of that.
* They're afraid of interviewing.
* They're working in smaller markets (e.g. a town which has maybe just one or two companies that hire developers).
* They're spending right up against their income or beyond it and are afraid of losing their job.
If they hit all of these checkboxes then I reckon this behavior is almost guaranteed and getting potentially "redundancy inducing information" out of them will be like pulling teeth. They'll be busy a lot. Far too busy to talk to you. Their docs likely won't be nonexistent (too obvious), but they will probably be deliberately obtuse.
They're primarily concerned not with learning but with not losing their primary source of income and their time horizon shortens, much like it does for those stuck in a behavioral poverty trap https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
Yes, this sort of behavior locks you further and further into the role you are in and is possibly self defeating, but it's entirely natural and fairly common.
* They're not very good developers and not very smart and probably somewhat cognizant of that.
* They're afraid of interviewing.
* They're working in smaller markets (e.g. a town which has maybe just one or two companies that hire developers).
* They're spending right up against their income or beyond it and are afraid of losing their job.
If they hit all of these checkboxes then I reckon this behavior is almost guaranteed and getting potentially "redundancy inducing information" out of them will be like pulling teeth. They'll be busy a lot. Far too busy to talk to you. Their docs likely won't be nonexistent (too obvious), but they will probably be deliberately obtuse.
They're primarily concerned not with learning but with not losing their primary source of income and their time horizon shortens, much like it does for those stuck in a behavioral poverty trap https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
Yes, this sort of behavior locks you further and further into the role you are in and is possibly self defeating, but it's entirely natural and fairly common.