| > What I discovered was that most of these brilliant people would not share a lot of their knowledge. Is that "would not" or "it isn't a priority"? In a consultant role, a lot of what I initially saw as my value was transferring as much knowledge as possible to my clients' staff. I prided myself on how much I was able to boostrap a team to self-sufficiency and how many years it was before I ever heard from them again. I was mostly wrong. For the vast majority of my clients' staff, my value lay in achieving some deliverable for them, and the value stream ended "dead right there". For technical concerns, it was way faster for clients' staff to treat me as a DSL Google for the particular problem space I was parachuted in to assist with, than for them to read the material I wrote for them. I did a long stint as a technical writer to put bread on the table while sharpening my coding/design skills in college, did a few user and developer guides for commercially released products that were well-received, so I am pretty sure the written material I leave with them is not lacking, as I re-use those skills weekly in my sales activities. It is an incentives and culture problem. People are heavily incentivized to short-term results, and long-term cognitive wealth is heavily discounted. It takes an active, conscious effort by an individual to work against that pressure and actually go beyond the process described in documentation if they get good procedures that not only explain what to do, but in a manner that doesn't interfere with streamlined procedure-following, the reasoning behind what they are doing so they are equipped with a model to handle edge cases that come up during operation of the procedure. In most average IT offices, there's probably 1 out of 10 who are like this to varying degrees, from the curious intern to the Free Electrons. They're a delight to work with and share with. The best part of sharing: I get to learn and push my own boundaries as I get to play with a new friend in the model space to discover new corners I missed earlier. I like feeling I'm the dumbest bloke in the room in a creative atmosphere when there is no pressure on to fix something quickly; that's when I learn the most, when my mind is on fire. I can see for someone like those on your team of brilliant mates, it can be hugely demoralizing over time to write and try to actively share, only to realize that only the rote part of it is ever used by the majority. That evolves over time into de-prioritizing that sharing to just the rote parts, and then as other teams ignore even that finding it easier to open incident tickets and loop them in, making only half-hearted attempts at sharing the rote parts. |