Tribal Knowledge
No, I don't mean this, although I have to admit, this guy has one of the most fascinating hobbies I've ever seen.
What differentiates a 20-year veteran of high-tech, struggling at a new job, from the tenured 2-year tech, who flawlessly and rapidly gets one thing after another done, with far less experience and education? Tribal Knowledge.
What scares the hell out of managers at an established enterprise, when they learn they are going to have to do a massive RIF at their company? It isn't loss of headcount, I can assure you. It is loss of Tribal Knowledge.
Tribal knowledge is what you pick up, on the job, just from doing it. You learn where everything is, what you need most, who to talk to, who to avoid. By its very nature, tribal knowledge cannot be written down, cannot be documented (documentation is no longer tribal knowledge), is absolutely necessary, constantly changing, almost ghostly.
Yet, it is a reality. It is so real, that it is the one thing that will make a powerful manager, who has the right and the authority to lay off one of his most troublesome underlings, stop dead and think again. Scott Adams has a character from the Dilbert comic strip, Wally, who specializes in doing as little as possible, and survives only by mastery of legacy systems that cannot be replaced and are absolutely necessary. Wally survives precisely because of his mastery of, and domination of, tribal knowledge.
I like to tease some of my colleagues who come from a particular country, where there is a famous, intensely competitive institute of higher learning, that their first semester curriculum includes code obfuscation, teleportation and levitation as core coursework. It's an exaggeration, of course, but incredibly funny, in light of our history together. The fundamental reality upon which the jokes are based is the competition and control of, you guessed it: tribal knowledge.
Food for thought. Don't get caught obfuscating! There are much better ways, more subtle, harder to control, such as creation of whole APIs the company depends upon, "well-documented", so large and complex that no one can understand them in less than a year. I'm sure you can think of even more subtle ways to help guarantee your job. :)
What differentiates a 20-year veteran of high-tech, struggling at a new job, from the tenured 2-year tech, who flawlessly and rapidly gets one thing after another done, with far less experience and education? Tribal Knowledge.
What scares the hell out of managers at an established enterprise, when they learn they are going to have to do a massive RIF at their company? It isn't loss of headcount, I can assure you. It is loss of Tribal Knowledge.
Tribal knowledge is what you pick up, on the job, just from doing it. You learn where everything is, what you need most, who to talk to, who to avoid. By its very nature, tribal knowledge cannot be written down, cannot be documented (documentation is no longer tribal knowledge), is absolutely necessary, constantly changing, almost ghostly.
Yet, it is a reality. It is so real, that it is the one thing that will make a powerful manager, who has the right and the authority to lay off one of his most troublesome underlings, stop dead and think again. Scott Adams has a character from the Dilbert comic strip, Wally, who specializes in doing as little as possible, and survives only by mastery of legacy systems that cannot be replaced and are absolutely necessary. Wally survives precisely because of his mastery of, and domination of, tribal knowledge.
I like to tease some of my colleagues who come from a particular country, where there is a famous, intensely competitive institute of higher learning, that their first semester curriculum includes code obfuscation, teleportation and levitation as core coursework. It's an exaggeration, of course, but incredibly funny, in light of our history together. The fundamental reality upon which the jokes are based is the competition and control of, you guessed it: tribal knowledge.
Food for thought. Don't get caught obfuscating! There are much better ways, more subtle, harder to control, such as creation of whole APIs the company depends upon, "well-documented", so large and complex that no one can understand them in less than a year. I'm sure you can think of even more subtle ways to help guarantee your job. :)
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