They will ask you to write it all down. Not because they want to improve quality. Because they want to email it.
It starts with a reasonable request. Document your design process. Map your workflows. Write procedures for how you select bearings, size shafts, set tolerances, run thermal calcs, validate test fixtures. They call it ISO 9001. They call it quality management. They call it "institutional knowledge capture." You do it because it sounds responsible, and because your name goes on the document, and because you were raised to believe that good engineers leave clean records. See Reason #40.
Then the procedures leave the building. Not as training material for the new hire down the hall. As an attachment to a contract engineering firm in another time zone. Your step-by-step becomes their checklist. Your judgment calls become their dropdown menus. Your institutional knowledge, the kind that took you a decade to build and a week to type, becomes the onboarding packet for someone billing at a third of your rate (see Reason #24).
This is the trick. Nobody tells you during the documentation push that you are writing your own replacement manual. The language is always improvement. Standardization. Repeatability. Risk reduction. The moment the PDF is final and the revision block is signed, it belongs to the company. And the company has already decided what to do with it. You have no professional body that will intervene, no guild clause that limits how your work product is deployed (see Reason #13).
The problem is that a procedure is not understanding. You can write down that a stator vane needs a specific trailing-edge radius for a given pressure ratio. You cannot write down the twenty iterations that taught you why, or the field return that taught you what happens when someone rounds it. A checklist can be followed. A feedback loop cannot be shipped (see Reason #33). The offshore house follows step four because step four says so. You followed step four because you watched step three fail on a test stand in 2014. That gap does not show up until warranty claims start arriving, and by then the people who understood the gap have been let go or moved on.
Management knows this will happen. They have seen it before, at Boeing, at Enphase, at every aerospace OEM that hollowed out its engineering bench in the name of cost reduction. They do it anyway because the savings land this quarter and the warranty costs land three years from now, under someone else's budget, on someone else's watch (see Reason #23). When the quality collapses, the fix is not to bring the work back. The fix is to add more review layers on top of the outsourced work. More checklists to check the checklists. More of your time spent verifying someone else's output instead of producing your own.
You will be asked to document everything you know. You should understand why.
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