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I'm a manager. (Sorry.) I do a weekly Friday "Ask me anything" on Zoom that's basically a free-form training session where people reporting to me (or other teams are fine, too) ask about how to do something or how we should be doing something, and we walk through it in video. One reason I started this is we had a mix of junior people, people who came in from acquisitions, and people who had changed tools and weren't sure of best practices. This stuff was supposed to be documented in wiki pages, and a lot of times it was, but when we'd run through it hands-on, we'd find details that weren't documented or had gone stale. Another reason is that formal written-in-advance training sessions are overbearing for everyone involved. They take too much time to prepare, too much time to give, nobody pays attention because they don't like being talked to, and if things go off script, the presenter has to scramble to adapt. It was better for someone to say on Monday "I need to know more about how we're supposed to be doing GitHub PR reviews" and then on Friday, I'd have a post-it of notes and we'd fire up a browser, go through a fake PR or look at an old one, and maybe talk about pain points or what isn't working. Also, we'd record these and store them for posterity, and so people in other time zones could catch them later. |