It's not a culture problem. It's a timing problem.
I've led engineering teams at four of Brazil's largest financial institutions — environments where decision traceability isn't optional. Audits require architectural rationale. Incidents demand post-mortems that explain not just what broke, but why the system was designed the way it was. Onboarding a new engineer means they need to understand decisions made months before they joined.
High-stakes environments. High documentation standards.
And even there, the same pattern kept appearing: the documentation existed, but the decisions didn't survive.
The timing trap
