Knowledge transfers, management dinosaurs, and one aspect of bad management

In a recent discussion, a link was posted to an article from a conservative by an older person on an alleged downside of working at home: not being able to progress one’s career because of the lack of face to face contact.

This is my reply to that:

Knowledge transfer is important, but these days you don't need to be sitting beside each other to do that. I've been educating team members since around 2002 . . . who are not located in the same office without any problems - their careers have progressed very well. If anything, the current batch of tools like . . ., where you can share screens, has made this even easier.

My experience is that the most significant hurdles are actually finding - or making - the time to meet and discuss matters outside of projects (which our new mentoring scheme is helping with), and to make sure that opportunities to pass on learning during a project are taken (learning by osmosis is hit and miss) - and on that, the reluctance of some engineers of my era (Mesozoic) to do so is regrettable, but budgets and time commitments can also make this harder.

The article was written by a social dinosaur, in my opinion, who did more to show his lack of comfort with technology, a possible reluctance to share, and an adherence to a rigid, hierarchic way of transferring status that is confused for “transferring knowledge”.

Being understaffed makes finding the time and energy to transfer knowledge (particularly for those with what are euphemistically referred to as “home duties”) quite difficult at times, so that doesn’t help - but that is the case whether working remotely or in the office. Don’t portray a workload or some other matter for a block to teaching when it isn’t, and don’t conflate passing on knowledge with the conveying of hierarchical approval of change in status.

On that, a post I will probably not have the time or energy to do is how bad managers push costs out of sight so they don't show up in their KPIs - even if it increases overall community costs. This includes things like not passing on project codes for “a few minutes of your time”.