3 ms·

Thanks for the comments everyone. You're not the first ones to give me feedback about co-inflating the two. In my mind saying that something is "hard to" write

by er4hn 3y ago

Thanks for the comments everyone. You're not the first ones to give me feedback about co-inflating the two. In my mind saying that something is "hard to" write down is still pretty similar to saying it is not written down. For one, if you say it's hard to write something down, you're setting yourself up for a scenario where judging outcomes based on that lack of written down knowledge is going to be painful. For example: "It's hard to describe how to write good tests, so we didn't write it down. But we also want our tests to be more reliable." How do you solve the two without writing down some way to learn how to be better at tests? Likewise, if you want to learn how to ride a bike, how do you get started? Back in the pre-covid days you could do a lot of experimentation and learning from others in person, but that doesn't scale as well in the post-covid, remote and global, workplace. That's one of the core concepts I was trying to capture.

travisjungroth 3y ago
Being pretty blunt here. I have a hard time taking your suggestions on documentation seriously when you’re redefining a well established term. “Tacit knowing” was introduced by Michael Polanyi in 1958. Its meaning has generally held in modern usage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge There’s also a meaningful critique here that documentation is not a solution to tacit knowledge sharing. It doesn’t work. To answer your bike question, you learn a bike by riding it. There’s skill progressions and tips and mental models to share, but you absolutely can’t learn to ride a bike by reading docs. There are skills that are only learned through experience and mentorship. People try otherwise and it usually fails. Do you have evidence otherwise? Do you have a case where you were able to pass tacit knowledge efficiently to a large group of people through docs?

by er4hn 3y ago

travisjungroth 3y ago

Being pretty blunt here. I have a hard time taking your suggestions on documentation seriously when you’re redefining a well established term. “Tacit knowing” was introduced by Michael Polanyi in 1958. Its meaning has generally held in modern usage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge There’s also a meaningful critique here that documentation is not a solution to tacit knowledge sharing. It doesn’t work. To answer your bike question, you learn a bike by riding it. There’s skill progressions and tips and mental models to share, but you absolutely can’t learn to ride a bike by reading docs. There are skills that are only learned through experience and mentorship. People try otherwise and it usually fails. Do you have evidence otherwise? Do you have a case where you were able to pass tacit knowledge efficiently to a large group of people through docs?