Comment by CableNinja
20 hours ago
I think that "everyday" would be a stretch, but i dont understand why youd think thats annoying, someone took the time to consider helping the rest of the engineering team grow, by posting something useful.
I frequently do the same, but not everyday; only when i think its something actually useful/helpful beyond the everyday crap. Most recently, we have had a huge push to use ai (just like everywhere else), ive been getting pretty creative with it, and at this point have a well polished setup that i can give a shitty sentence on a problem, not only does it understand the task, but theres a full ticket->branch->work->pr review->ready comment flow that it uses. My team also uses ai but they havent quite wrapped their head on ways to really work with it. I have built and shared a number of helpful things with the team to try and help them grow. One such thing was a doc i had my ai instance write, based on how ive been using my setup. This alone has started to get the rest of the team up to where i am.
My team doesnt share the same types of things i do, but they still share helpful things.
Call it what you will; I think if youre not helping your team grow by providing insights and helpful things, then youre not the kind of person i want to work with.
I think there's a fine line between helping your team grow and the sorta annoying self promotion I've seen people do in overly broad slack channels.
One is actually helping and the other is making yourself more visible to mgmt for promotions.
We work in very different places. Wherever I've worked, the guy who knows all these tricks is not the guy getting promoted. Senior management doesn't care about your shell or scripting skills. Sure - they make you more productive, but at a very local level (may be good for a single promotion early in your career).
Most senior engineers I've worked with have forgotten all these tricks, and they actively tell you that while you should try to get better at these things, career gains lie elsewhere. Focus on things with higher impact.
I rather think the opposite. People who share tips and hacks are genuinely trying to help others, while people who hoard information are competing on an individual basis without regard for team.
Please take this in good faith, as I hope your own post is, but I interpret the thread you're replying to as focusing on the "everyday' part.
Share knowledge? I don't think anyone here is arguing against that in any way (or conversely arguing for hoarding knowledge).
The concern, one I share, is where the sharing has to happen publicly "every day" - so no matter how trivial, useless, niche, overly-specific the tip is (whatever, the list isn't exclusive), someone shares it.
That's the part that's not sharing knowledge for the benefit of others, but rather self-serving. I might even go so far as to say self-serving doesn't even need to be selfish; the person might genuinely believe they're doing good, but even there, self-serving.
TLDR: Share your knowledge, don't make sharing something every day, even when you don't have something valuable to share, your target.
PS - if this note irks anyone (are routine maxxers a thing?), make the goal to learn something every day, then share where appropriate.
2 replies →
Depends on the banality of the tips.
Why just one each day then? Why not a shared knowledge base? Do you start with a "bag of tricks" and then hand them out one by one each day to remind people you're the guy with the bag of tricks?
"Oh, yeah, I know a cool trick, but y'all have to wait until tomorrow to find out what it is."
"Look! It's a way to evaluate SQL expressions with a select with a from! Oh, you already knew about it?"
I have nothing against sharing knowledge, especially when seeing someone else do something that can be done better. But just leaving daily breadcrumbs to remind people you're the guy that teaches random trivia feels like attention seeking.
Sharing an hundred tips one tip a day has certainly more chance to be shared correctly than pointing to a page containing those hundred tips.
Personally I don't care if the guy looks for attention or not. IMO people that do care have likely some jealousy issues ("I don't want other to get more attention than I do"). Lose-lose attitude.
Because it's about the journey and not just the artefact. If you're not thinking of something that's useful and preparing snippets to share every day you are not practising it. Having to come up with something stretches your imagination and critical thinking skills. What's true for the writer is true for the reader - if you just shared a simple repository with tricks, exceedingly few are going to read that, and the ones who do will forget it. Daily practise is important.
I don't think that's a generous way to interpret it.
I see it more as: every day they will go on the slack channel and pause, wondering "Is there a neat trick I've learned or used recently?" then they share it. It's like a ritual to remember that you can share things because it's easy to forget other people don't work the same way you do. Writing it all at once is difficult (you have to remember a lot of stuff at once) and it tends to go unread.
I also think every single day is a stretch, but it's nice to pause once in a while to think about how you could help other people with something you've learned.
You’re right, a centralized repository would be good too.
Both a centralized repository AND a daily message, especially for new employees, would be ideal, imo!
Normalize chatting and sharing stuff in slack!