How information is shared
Do not share information
What is the one common theme that I have seen in people since I started my career?
Nobody shares technical (I happen to notice this because I am in a technical field. But in general, this applies to all kinds of) information.
I’ve seen this in people since I started my career. I just didn’t understand it properly.
Lesson to learn: Stop oversharing information.
Not every single person in your team/company needs to know every single detail about your the work that you are doing. Not only that, but they don’t even want to know - unless their ass is on the line. If you feel truly moved to share your struggle about some work that you are doing, hoping it will be therapeutic and help other developers in the team/company, think about the consequences of doing that. The minute you put that information out, you are dispensable. You need to understand healthy boundaries.
Agile methodology only makes this worse. Nobody needs to write documentation anymore.
e.g.
Shankar in DCS project.
In Walmart, the team from offshore has been working on the applications for years. But when I asked them questions, it was as if I am on an entirely different planet. They never respond. They are protecting their jobs. How is sharing information with me going to help them? Not only will it not help them - if I turn out to be someone that does a good job, it will hurt them.
In HHS, nobody ever sets up documentation for the applications.
At Ford, some contractors from RedHat (RedHat has a contract with Ford to supply contractors) have been working on some applications. They wrote them using GoLang for backend applications and React for frontend. They did not set up any documentation. They do not offer to show what they did. For reasons that I don’t know, Ford is terminating it’s contract with RedHat. For this reason, they asked the contractors to help onboard new members in the team. The reaction from one of the developers from RedHat was “This team has too many people. The team doesn’t need this many people. It is ridiculous. A single person can do what the new people are trying to do.” He is trying to say that the team doesn’t need new members. In other words, he is saying, “Get rid of the new members in the team. We will do the job just fine.” He is trying to protect his turf.
How to deal with technical information?
Write notes for yourself but do not share it with anyone else.
If someone higher up from your team forces you to share information, create a very colorful document that explains the higher level details. But never share every little detail. Always withhold some piece of information. The objective is, any piece of work in that area should not proceed without your input. Teams/companies should be so dependent upon you that if they ever think that you are going to leave the company, they should shiver.
How information is shared
Organizations make progress by sharing information effectively
Source: wired.com article about Nvidea
Information doesn’t have to flow from the top to the bottom of an organization, as it did back in the Neanderthal days when we didn’t have email and texts and all those things. Information can flow a lot more quickly today. So a hierarchical tree, with information being interpreted from the top down to the bottom, is unnecessary. A flat network allows us to adapt a lot more quickly, which we need because our technology is moving so quickly.
If you look at the way Nvidia’s technology has moved, classically there was Moore’s law doubling every couple of years. Well, in the course of the last 10 years, we’ve advanced AI by about a million times. That’s many, many times Moore’s law. If you’re living in an exponential world, you don’t want information to be propagated from the top down one layer at a time.