[zinkem]

I come from a retail management background, so I'm a newbie to the tech industry.

The guys who taught me retail management put extreme emphasis on training. Training and knowledge dissemination was a top priority for the management teams I worked with. Once I was managing my own stores, I adopted this world view and had great success.

Coming from this background I'm sometimes surprised there aren't more articles about improving the flow of knowledge and communication within organizations.

So what gives? I learn a lot of stuff on my own (as do most of my tech savvy friends), is that the way things work in tech? Or are training and communication just not discussed very often because they're seen as so elementary?

[lsc]

training in the UNIX industry is largely ignored (or done so badly that it might as well be ignored) by the business folks. But informal mentoring is extremely common.

Your UNIX folks will informally organize themselves around the best people, regardless of the org chart you try to impose from above. Part of the job of being the senior person is mentoring the newer people. This is done informally, but fairly consistently across most places I've worked.

[j_baker]

It really depends on the organization. But in general, it's expected that you take some level of ownership over your own training. On the other hand, it's impractical to expect that people will know every element of your technology stack. Most of the time, it's expected that you know the core of the technology stack (like the programming language), but it's ok not to know every technology. And even then, you're expected to be able to get up to speed on what you don't know quickly and without sucking up too much of your peers' time.

[quanticle]

The problem with knowledge transfer in the tech. industry is one of purpose. The vast amount of implicit knowledge, the little tricks and gotchas that are always different from job to job and the lack of systematic documentation make any sort of formal training program extremely difficult to implement.