June 20, 2008 at 6:18 am
This is from SQL-Server-Performance.com newsletter by Peter Ward.
One of the key components to working in a team is ensuring that there is collaboration between all the team members. The problem is that often individuals are afraid of sharing knowledge and will use information as a way of ensuring their own survival in an organization. Their attitude is "if I know something that someone else doesn't know then my employer will be unable to do without me." The problem with this is that a team is unable to scale as one person becomes a bottleneck for information flow.
A tool that I have being introducing of late to teams in order to assist with the collaboration process is the use of a Wiki. One of the problems with formal documentation as a means of collaboration is that nobody enjoys it and often more time is spent fighting the format of a document rather than actually writing the content. A Wiki is an informal process meaning that it might be anything from a description of how to resolve a problem to something as simple as an interesting code snippet or a URL to an article. One organization I know actually ties the KPI's of an individual to the amount of collaboration they perform on the DBA Wiki. I would love to hear what tools have worked for your team to foster collaboration.
- Peter Ward
Does any of you due with people liked that?
BTW some of the people I work with like to brag about what kind of stuffs that they had done before and the companies seemed to get lost once they left. How do you due with those people?
From my experience, people who had great skills never bragged about what they did, you knew they were good from their work. The people bragged about what they did usually were not the best one. Maybe just my experiences.
There is a Chinese saying 'If the flowers smell good, you can smell far away!, if they are not, you cannot smell even you stand next to them !'
my 2 cents.
BTW I start my new job, it is my nth job. I stop counting how many jobs I have anymore!!!! 😛
June 20, 2008 at 7:34 am
My gut reaction is: pick your battles. Don't take that kind of attitude head-on. Braggarts will continue to do so no matter what, so just look past it.
Instead I'd focus on making an environment which is NOT threatening, and promotes/forces openness. With all of the flaws or perversions you might run into with some things like Agile dev, the Scrum concept of having two devs always working closely in tandem, and having "cage-match" reviews of two different version of code, can be really constructive and useful to BOTH, assuming noone lets attitude get into the mix.
We introduced "show and tell" back in, where team members were asked to present things they've been working on recently (we were a somewhat siloed group back then, with everyone essentially working on distinct things). It took a while to get there, but it evolved into a pseudo code review/feature whitepaper/sneak preview of coming attractions time. It also had the side effect of "forcing" presenters to get their code formatted correctly, commented accurately, etc...
It took the lead devs doing presentations on THEIR stuff for 4 month straight before someone less senior had the guts to step up. Once that person went and got a positive reaction, all of a sudden the presentation times were in high demand (people WANTED to present, because they got a lot of ideas out of it). To the point that we made Show and Tell its own meeting, and not just the tail-end of our regular team meet.
Small groups work better when things are open, and collaboration occurs (bigger groups as well, but I think it's amplified in smaller groups).
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
June 20, 2008 at 8:55 am
I've seen it both ways, and bragging doesn't always have anything to do with skill in my experience.
If someone is right, you might be annoyed by their bragging, but they're doing a good job. If they're wrong, they're wrong.
I think it's OK to point out you did something if you're proud of it. Some people might not know.
There's quite a struggle that many of us have because at review/interview time you need to brag and show off what you've done, but most of us have spent time just working and not bragging. Remember that you have to show your skills to your boss or prospective employer. no one else will/
June 27, 2008 at 10:37 am
I can't say I have worked for a company with colleagues like that.
I suppose when I left one company I had more information about processes than I could pass over. At that point I was the DBA as well as the developer. I never held information back, but yes, they did struggle for a few months after I left - I had many calls/e-mails asking how something worked which I did not mind answering or even going in after hours to help out.
However, if a colleague was holding back information on processes in an attempt to make themselves indespensible, then this is an issue which management should address. What happens when your colleague is on holiday and things go wrong - nobody knows how to fix it. You could hold the colleague responsible for not documenting (I can't talk really considering the example above) but more so, their manager for not ensuring the knowledge was passed around.
And as you rightly say, the ones who brag are the ones who cling on to their information.
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