The Knowledge Ratchet: Why I’m Writing Down Everything I Learned at 350+ SCADA Sites

The most valuable engineering knowledge in the world isn’t in any documentation. It’s in Cliff’s head. And Cliff retires in three years.

Every industrial site I’ve ever worked on has a Cliff.

Cliff has been there since before the control system was on a network. Cliff knows that the HMI in Building 4 drops its connection exactly when it rains (humidity in the junction box, never properly sealed), that you absolutely never reboot the historian on a Tuesday (nobody currently working remembers why, but everyone complies with religious fervor), and that the “spare” gigabit switch in the cabinet is actually critical to load balancing, despite living in a box labeled “SPARE.” None of this is documented anywhere. All of it is essential. When Cliff retires, the site doesn’t lose an employee — it loses its operating system.

I spent a year doing SCADA network engineering across 350+ field sites. I learned that the real org chart of industrial operations is Cliffs all the way down. And I learned something else: the Cliff model is ending.

The one-way ratchet

Here’s what’s changing. Expertise is migrating from heads into artifacts — runbooks, playbooks, SOPs, config repos, scripts, checklists that machines can actually execute. And this migration has a peculiar property: it only goes one direction.

Once knowledge is captured — written down, versioned, published — it never returns to being scarce. Every documented procedure, every written-down war story, every captured bit of “that one thing nobody else knows” permanently joins the pool that every AI system, and every junior engineer with access to one, can draw on. Instantly. Forever.

A human takes 20–30 years to become a Cliff. A model with access to every captured Cliff absorbs all of it before breakfast, and never forgets where Building 4’s rain problem is filed. The asymmetry is complete. The ratchet only ratchets one way.

Notice the load-bearing word: captured. The ratchet only turns on knowledge that gets written down. The knowledge that stays in Cliff’s head stays scarce. The knowledge that gets documented becomes commons. Which creates two very different futures depending on which side of the pen you’re on.

The two sides

If you hoard tacit knowledge as job security: The ratchet is coming for you. Maybe slowly, maybe suddenly — all it takes is one colleague, one vendor engineer, one consultant somewhere on the planet to document what you know, and your 25-year moat evaporates. The knowledge you were using as leverage is now public. And you have nothing else.

If you’re the one doing the capturing: You own the future. The person who writes it down gets to define what “correct” means. Their name is on it. Their judgment is embedded in it. The artifact itself becomes the thing you’re paid for, not the knowledge — and artifacts scale in a way that answering questions at your desk never did. One person, one playbook, reaches a thousand sites. That playbook is yours.

So I’m writing it all down

This is why I’ve started systematically documenting everything from my two years in the field — not as some altruistic open-source contribution (though it might end up that way), but because this is the game.

• The segmentation patterns that actually survive contact with a plant floor (spoiler: many don’t)
• The FortiGate configurations for OT that the official docs are too polite to give you
• The assessment checklist I wish someone had handed me at site #1 instead of letting me derive it painfully across sites #1 through #40
• The vendor-specific quirks that aren’t in the documentation but will destroy your week if you don’t know them
• The things that “best practices” say to do and the things that actually work when the equipment is 20 years old and running firmware that was last updated in 2008

Selfishly, it’s the best studying I’ve ever done. Nothing exposes the gaps in your understanding like trying to write instructions someone else could follow. You can think you know something. You can’t write instructions about it without actually knowing it.

Strategically, it’s the entire game. In a world where captured knowledge compounds and uncaptured knowledge dies with the Cliffs, the documentation is the career. The person who documents OT segmentation patterns owns the consulting business for OT segmentation. The person who documents the painful lessons from 200 sites owns the playbook everyone else will follow.

The window for this is finite. Right now, OT knowledge is still mostly in Cliff’s head. In three years, some of it won’t be. In seven years, all the easy pieces will be captured, and the competitive advantage will shift to synthesis and judgment. Get ahead of it now.