Told off for it
When I gave my notice to an aerospace company, the unqualified CEO (it was a small firm) didn't open the email I sent with my "take this job....." notification until a few days before I was leaving. One of the issues I had with the company was the grief I was given for "taking too much time with documentation". As the head of the department of one, it took time for the company to get around to finding a replacement. Software is good, but you have to have somebody designing hardware for it to run on (embedded stuff). A little birdy told me a few months later that the new guy, that was universally despised from day one, was gushing over having such great documentation that let him get up to speed quickly on everything except the oldest machine which I was specifically told to not do any work on because it was being retired. Of course they didn't retire it and wound up having to pay all sorts of overtime to give it a total makeover and were hampered by the fact that all of the documentation that did exist didn't match up with how it sat. I put so much work on it that I could have sat down and done most of the wiring diagrams from memory. It did need a complete rebuild as it was the company's first successful machine and had been revised so many times there wasn't a wire longer than 600cm on it's 3m height. I remember having to pull out a handful of crispy wiring that had been inside the control box for at least a year after one mishap. The person before me just wired a repair around it and left the bad wiring in.
Many times, your dedication and attention to detail isn't going to be appreciated by corporate until long after you are gone. At least you get some satisfaction that it wasn't your fault when the car park gate tries to slice the execu-barge in twain.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
