dxmio.com

Disclaimer: To the person who held an IM conversation with me last night, this does not relate to our discussion, so please don’t interpret it as such, you are safe.

I’ve come to the realization that our IT profession as a whole entity is by nature moving slower than it needs to be, and I’ll tell you why.

How is it that knowledge is passed on/down to the succeeding generation of IT professionals? By training and word of mouth. You can argue that individuals should ‘RTFM dood’, but a significant amount of cases exist where the ‘M’ in that statement is worthless, unintuitive, and thus not adequete for knowledge consumption, thus requiring that those in-the-know clarify or improve that documentation before a newcomer can absorb it. Further exasperating the issue is that when a newcomer encounters this difficulty, the in-the-know class of person 9 times out of 10 will put on the stereotypical arrogant gee-how-come-you-dont-know-this-already attitude.

I wouldn’t say I’m innocent in this regard because I’m sure I’ve been guilty of the crime myself on a number of occasions. I don’t really have any good answers as to why it occurs, or how best to counter it.

The bottom line is that this attitude problem requires adjustment, otherwise newcomers are going to be discouraged from asking questions, absorb less knowledge, and thus slow our entire profession down.

Please, if you have knowledge that someone else does not have, drop the attitude, you aren’t as special as you think, and there are vast amounts of knowledge that you can share, and more importantly vast amounts of knowledge you do not have. Be humble.

/rant