A very senior Oracle consultant once said about his new assignment:
“They have all sorts of different systems running here. And as near as I can tell, absolutely none of it is documented. All of the documentation is in the head of an employee named Sri. And, as near as I can tell, if Sri goes out for lunch and gets hit by a bus, this company goes out of business fifteen minutes later.”
Yes... that’s the same MO here.
That makes Sri a vary valuable person, and compensated accordingly, no?
I've had two jobs outsourced out from under me. Both times, neither company was all that concerned about documentation. "We need to document this, WBill, but first, you need to fix these 57 other things. Do the docs in your spare time." .....then, all of a sudden, documentation percolated up to the top of the list. Always. "Make two afternoons a week available to do nothing else", and so on.
First time I had it to happen, I said "great", since I don't particularly mind documenting, and I didn't realize what was going on. Second time, I spent lots of afternoons self-documenting on my resume and cover letters. :-)