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So many amazing thoughts in this article that apply to the world of software engineering. If tacit knowledge is as important as the author makes out, then hiri
by xrd 6y ago
So many amazing thoughts in this article that apply to the world of software engineering.
If tacit knowledge is as important as the author makes out, then hiring "young guns" is always going to have a cost over hiring people that have done it before. As an older developer, that's interesting to me. A contrary point, however, is that maybe all businesses are new domains of exploration, so you might as well pay the cheapest person to develop your domain specific tacit knowledge.
If tacit knowledge is not something you can get by reading, then training and mentoring is much better (dare I say vital!) than documenting it all in a wiki, or just making sure everything is done asynchronously in a well written pull request.
If tacit knowledge is that important, then getting it is a privilege. If you are in a position where you can be paid to develop those skills and don't just have to read up in the evenings after your kids have gone to bed. Many people don't have that privilege but the software industry prides itself partially on the idea that you just have to self teach yourself; if you aren't doing that, you won't be successful in your job. Tacit knowledge is not that.
- groby_b 6y agoAll software has two domains of tacit knowledge. One is the domain where the software is applied, one is the knowledge of how to build software that maps to requirements. You'll always pay for acquiring the applied domain knowledge, you can save on paying for the software engineering knowledge acquisition. If you're smart, you have both a senior and a junior engineer so you can transfer the software domain knowledge, because acquiring tacit knowledge by working under a knowledgable expert is... not free, but close to it.
- joe_the_user 6y agoIf tacit knowledge is not something you can get by reading, then training and mentoring is much better (dare I say vital!) than documenting it all in a wiki, or just making sure everything is done asynchronously in a well written pull request. This is a weird thing to argue. Productivity could be something like [system-knowledge] X [tacit-knowledge-of-programming] so just tacit knowledge wouldn't get a team maximum productivity. Altogether, it seems like what's tacit in programming or tacit in any complex domain is "how to integrate different complex and sometimes contradictory things". It's important but hardly important in a "you can discard everything else, this is the magic" sort of way.
- xrd 6y agoI agree with you. But, tell me if you think I'm wrong: I'm arguing that most software companies have a mentality like you describe: "you can discard everything else, this is the magic" about wikis, PRs (so they generally ignore mentoring and training, or at least don't want it on their employees schedules). I think you are saying I'm saying that I think that mentoring and training allow you to throw the rest away. I'm not saying that.
- yumaikas 6y agoIt's also worth bearing in mind that tacit knowledge can lead you astray. And that tacit knowledge can be developed without having to be in the same room as someone. It's just that it's learned and communicated _differently_ than explicit knowledge. I think there's room to explore in the area of building exercises that try to build this tacit knowledge. Though some things are prohibitively expensive to learn outside of a work context. There are definitely a lot of things I've learned in a work context as a software developer that would have taken a lot longer to learn on my own.
- petra 6y agoThat's an interesting view. How can tacit knowledge be learned without being in the same room with someone ?
- necovek 6y agoTo go with the OP analogy: you can learn to ride a bicycle simply by trying, and having seen others ride bicycles. The tacit is in the fact that trying beats explanations because there are so many variables to account for (eg balancing, how it feels to balance and glide will be different for everyone due to their limbs being of different length, their center of mass being different, their level of fear being different and whoknowswhatelse).