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> unguided “water-cooler” interaction This meme needs to stop. Knowledge transfer from experts to novices is way too important to be left to chance. And thanks

> unguided “water-cooler” interaction This meme needs to stop. Knowledge transfer from experts to novices is way too important to be left to chance. And thanks to pre-pivot StackOverflow we even have considerable data on how much better it can be done, at least for white collar industries. Reducing the effort of experts to give advice, and enlarging the audience benefiting from a singular effort to write it down is orders of magnitude better than chance.

elcritch 1y ago
What? No, those free form unguided interactions are very useful for most novices. They're not a replacement for more structured knowledge teansfer, but an important compliment. Sure some novices are just natural talents that can pick up complex material from structured content alone. They're few though. > The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their decisions is what makes it so useful for novices to spend time with experts. Often there’s an underlying pattern that the novice can pick up through careful observation, even if neither the expert nor the novice can properly articulate this pattern. That explains part of it well. It's also an effect you can observe with graduate students of nobel prize winners tending to be "related" to professors who won nobel prizes or were part of their labs, etc. There's lessons imparted far beyond the structured material which is often available. Things like mindset, culture, and more are shared this way. Remote work is great, but it does limit these free form personal interactions which can be so invaluable. I'm a big fan of the potential for VR and AR to enable these experiences with remote work.
- elcritch 1y ago
  Chicken "sexing" is a fun example of how expert knowledge can be transferred without either expert or novice being able to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7OgZdxRnog&t=174 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7OgZdxRnog&t=174
  - nyanpasu64 1y ago
    I've read that birds used to have penises (and paleognaths and waterfowl still have them today), but the Galliformes (including chickens) developed atrophied penises which are difficult to see (hence chick sexing and feeding males to the meat grinder), and the Neoaves lost them entirely. Though https://prumlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/brennan_etal_2008_independent.pdf https://prumlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/brennan_etal_20... suggests the exact nature is more variable between birds in lineages that "have" them
- philipswood 1y ago
  You don't need to wait for AR/VR. For computer work the real space of interaction is currently the screen. Unstructured pair programming for two remotes with a shared screen and audio and chat is a way more effective interaction than most things you could do together at the office. Even better if both of you have two screens - so besides the shared space, you have a separate work area where you can Google things, ask the AI, spelunk the codebase for related relevant features or try one-liners.
  - elcritch 1y ago
    Certainly more effective at short term GTD, but less so at sharing intangibles or lowering the barrier to more general or spontaneous communication.
  - beyarkay 1y ago
    (author here) it's a pity that there's no way to emulate an office's "just peer around your screen and ask your colleague" dynamic. Having your video camera always on is too creepy, and constantly being in a voice call with your peers still feels a bit weird.
- beyarkay 1y ago
  (author here) I love the graduate student + nobel laureate reference, I had read that study but totally forgot how relevant it is to the essay. Absolutely it hammers home the point that there's something about just spending casual time with experts in a field that's invaluable to novices, regardless of the skill/talent of the novice.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    I'm reading a book that's partly inspired by academia settings and one thing that jumped to me is the papers vs lab interactions in learning. All the things that you need to know is already in the papers, but the link between the concepts is rarely explained and that's what gives you the solution for a given problem. The MDN is a very comprehensive documentation for all things about programming a web application. But for a given task, the subset of docs you want and the link between them is not on MDN, it's found in the experience you have in dealing with similar things. And that's what you can give junior, the recipe for all the ingredients they need for a solution. Letting them try first is for them to get to know the ingredients and kinda the general steps. By the time you tell them the recipes, they can just focus on the precise steps and measurements.
asplake 1y ago
It’s not either/or. No formal process or knowledge management system is so efficient that people won’t from time to time lack the context they need to make good decisions. Informal conversations made possible by seniors making themselves available and present makes up at least part of the shortfall. Moreover, informal conversations can benefit both parties. How many bad strategic decisions are made for want of on-the-ground context? It’s a well-studied problem. See my recent book “Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation”. Or if you prefer original sources to modern takes, note that Stafford Beer followed up Brain of the Firm with Heart of Enterprise. Between the two books, the most significant change in his Viable System Model was to address this issue.
nottorp 1y ago
If you only do structured knowledge transfer you get to transfer whatever the expert thinks they should pass on and at best also what the novice thinks they should learn. Which may or may not be the full expertise.
- coolcase 1y ago
  A good documenter is the novice who just learned. (Maybe the expert should vet it for accuracy)
  - beyarkay 1y ago
    (author here) Absolutely agree. Another commenter mentioned that sometimes the best mentor is someone slightly better than you, and not some seasoned veteran. You want someone knowledgeable enough to give good (and correct) advice, but not so knowledgeable that they struggle to be comprehensible.
    - nottorp 1y ago
      I took contact with an existing code base about a year ago. Tbh I would have been better at explaining it after 6 months than I am now. I've already worked with it enough that I've internalized some basics and I'm sure I'll forget to mention them when explaining to a hypothetical new guy.
- kortilla 1y ago
  Stack overflow is questions asked by novices. That’s the point
  - nottorp 1y ago
    Stack overflow is "closed due to being a duplicate" and "closed due to not containing ready to copy paste code".
    - Wobbles42 1y ago
hansvm 1y ago
Not really. It's the same reason formal lectures are so much less valuable than one-on-one mentoring. An expert's value doesn't come from a bundle of facts, but from being able to figure out which facts you need to hear right this second given your current background, and figuring out how to present them so that you in particular can apply them. Having a motivating problem to discuss also helps both parties appropriately engage. You can reduce the chance element a bit by having dedicated pairing time or something, and writing things down is better than nothing, but if you want to level up your juniors as fast as possible you'll definitely want some of that water cooler time.
- beyarkay 1y ago
  (author here) I think there's something to be said for having both (if I allow myself to imagine an unrealistic utopia). Imagining the distribution of how much benefit novices get out of a scenario, only having the watercooler interactions probably has a high maximum benefit (i.e. there's some expert that loves teaching and puts loads of time into helping novices) but probably also a very low minimum benefit (i.e. there are no experts at the company, or the experts couldn't care less about helping out). So it's the risky scenario, with a high variance. Only having formal teaching doesn't have nearly as low a minimum (even a lecturer doing the bare minimum is better than no lecturer), but also doesn't have nearly as high a maximum (a high-effort lecturer simply cannot pay attention to each of the 300 students in a lecture hall, no matter how hard they try). So having the formal teaching raises the minimum, ensuring the worst outcomes are not that bad, and adding in some watercooler interactions raises the maximum, ensuring that high-effort experts are able to converse with interested novices.
beyarkay 1y ago
(author here) I absolutely agree that knowledge transfer shouldn't be left to chance, and that there should be more consistent processes in place to make sure this happens. But I still think there's something to be gained from experts and novices having a more casual conversation about various topics. When I was getting started in software, some of the most valuable conversations I had were after a technical meeting, when I could pick a seniors brain on the way out of the room, asking them why XYZ solution was dismissed immediately. Encouraging frequent and casual conversation between experts & novices is key.
- edelbitter 1y ago
  > after a technical meeting .. I could To be fair, almost any form of one-on-one exchange looks really effective when you contrast it with the average badly-moderated, way-too-many-peoples-time-wasted-if-you-ask-questions, no-prepared-agenda, in-person meeting. One contrast I find more impressive is the valuable advice I received from people.. already dead for years. Skipping possibly helping 2 or 3 additional novices, by instead spending that time on refining a quick reply to one person into a reusable misconception-untangling guide. Useful to 100 more, for years to come. IMNSHO, if a company is not even encouraging such soft-skills via the easy pickings (like turning their buzzword-infested PR slopstream back into a proper technical weblog), they are not missing a key - they got too many locks confining available expert knowledge.

elcritch 1y ago

What? No, those free form unguided interactions are very useful for most novices. They're not a replacement for more structured knowledge teansfer, but an important compliment. Sure some novices are just natural talents that can pick up complex material from structured content alone. They're few though. > The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their decisions is what makes it so useful for novices to spend time with experts. Often there’s an underlying pattern that the novice can pick up through careful observation, even if neither the expert nor the novice can properly articulate this pattern. That explains part of it well. It's also an effect you can observe with graduate students of nobel prize winners tending to be "related" to professors who won nobel prizes or were part of their labs, etc. There's lessons imparted far beyond the structured material which is often available. Things like mindset, culture, and more are shared this way. Remote work is great, but it does limit these free form personal interactions which can be so invaluable. I'm a big fan of the potential for VR and AR to enable these experiences with remote work.

elcritch 1y ago
Chicken "sexing" is a fun example of how expert knowledge can be transferred without either expert or novice being able to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7OgZdxRnog&t=174 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7OgZdxRnog&t=174
- nyanpasu64 1y ago
  I've read that birds used to have penises (and paleognaths and waterfowl still have them today), but the Galliformes (including chickens) developed atrophied penises which are difficult to see (hence chick sexing and feeding males to the meat grinder), and the Neoaves lost them entirely. Though https://prumlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/brennan_etal_2008_independent.pdf https://prumlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/brennan_etal_20... suggests the exact nature is more variable between birds in lineages that "have" them
philipswood 1y ago
You don't need to wait for AR/VR. For computer work the real space of interaction is currently the screen. Unstructured pair programming for two remotes with a shared screen and audio and chat is a way more effective interaction than most things you could do together at the office. Even better if both of you have two screens - so besides the shared space, you have a separate work area where you can Google things, ask the AI, spelunk the codebase for related relevant features or try one-liners.
- elcritch 1y ago
  Certainly more effective at short term GTD, but less so at sharing intangibles or lowering the barrier to more general or spontaneous communication.
- beyarkay 1y ago
  (author here) it's a pity that there's no way to emulate an office's "just peer around your screen and ask your colleague" dynamic. Having your video camera always on is too creepy, and constantly being in a voice call with your peers still feels a bit weird.
beyarkay 1y ago
(author here) I love the graduate student + nobel laureate reference, I had read that study but totally forgot how relevant it is to the essay. Absolutely it hammers home the point that there's something about just spending casual time with experts in a field that's invaluable to novices, regardless of the skill/talent of the novice.
- skydhash 1y ago
  I'm reading a book that's partly inspired by academia settings and one thing that jumped to me is the papers vs lab interactions in learning. All the things that you need to know is already in the papers, but the link between the concepts is rarely explained and that's what gives you the solution for a given problem. The MDN is a very comprehensive documentation for all things about programming a web application. But for a given task, the subset of docs you want and the link between them is not on MDN, it's found in the experience you have in dealing with similar things. And that's what you can give junior, the recipe for all the ingredients they need for a solution. Letting them try first is for them to get to know the ingredients and kinda the general steps. By the time you tell them the recipes, they can just focus on the precise steps and measurements.

asplake 1y ago

It’s not either/or. No formal process or knowledge management system is so efficient that people won’t from time to time lack the context they need to make good decisions. Informal conversations made possible by seniors making themselves available and present makes up at least part of the shortfall. Moreover, informal conversations can benefit both parties. How many bad strategic decisions are made for want of on-the-ground context? It’s a well-studied problem. See my recent book “Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation”. Or if you prefer original sources to modern takes, note that Stafford Beer followed up Brain of the Firm with Heart of Enterprise. Between the two books, the most significant change in his Viable System Model was to address this issue.

nottorp 1y ago

If you only do structured knowledge transfer you get to transfer whatever the expert thinks they should pass on and at best also what the novice thinks they should learn. Which may or may not be the full expertise.

coolcase 1y ago
A good documenter is the novice who just learned. (Maybe the expert should vet it for accuracy)
- beyarkay 1y ago
  (author here) Absolutely agree. Another commenter mentioned that sometimes the best mentor is someone slightly better than you, and not some seasoned veteran. You want someone knowledgeable enough to give good (and correct) advice, but not so knowledgeable that they struggle to be comprehensible.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    I took contact with an existing code base about a year ago. Tbh I would have been better at explaining it after 6 months than I am now. I've already worked with it enough that I've internalized some basics and I'm sure I'll forget to mention them when explaining to a hypothetical new guy.
kortilla 1y ago
Stack overflow is questions asked by novices. That’s the point
- nottorp 1y ago
  Stack overflow is "closed due to being a duplicate" and "closed due to not containing ready to copy paste code".
  - Wobbles42 1y ago

hansvm 1y ago

Not really. It's the same reason formal lectures are so much less valuable than one-on-one mentoring. An expert's value doesn't come from a bundle of facts, but from being able to figure out which facts you need to hear right this second given your current background, and figuring out how to present them so that you in particular can apply them. Having a motivating problem to discuss also helps both parties appropriately engage. You can reduce the chance element a bit by having dedicated pairing time or something, and writing things down is better than nothing, but if you want to level up your juniors as fast as possible you'll definitely want some of that water cooler time.

beyarkay 1y ago
(author here) I think there's something to be said for having both (if I allow myself to imagine an unrealistic utopia). Imagining the distribution of how much benefit novices get out of a scenario, only having the watercooler interactions probably has a high maximum benefit (i.e. there's some expert that loves teaching and puts loads of time into helping novices) but probably also a very low minimum benefit (i.e. there are no experts at the company, or the experts couldn't care less about helping out). So it's the risky scenario, with a high variance. Only having formal teaching doesn't have nearly as low a minimum (even a lecturer doing the bare minimum is better than no lecturer), but also doesn't have nearly as high a maximum (a high-effort lecturer simply cannot pay attention to each of the 300 students in a lecture hall, no matter how hard they try). So having the formal teaching raises the minimum, ensuring the worst outcomes are not that bad, and adding in some watercooler interactions raises the maximum, ensuring that high-effort experts are able to converse with interested novices.

beyarkay 1y ago

(author here) I absolutely agree that knowledge transfer shouldn't be left to chance, and that there should be more consistent processes in place to make sure this happens. But I still think there's something to be gained from experts and novices having a more casual conversation about various topics. When I was getting started in software, some of the most valuable conversations I had were after a technical meeting, when I could pick a seniors brain on the way out of the room, asking them why XYZ solution was dismissed immediately. Encouraging frequent and casual conversation between experts & novices is key.

edelbitter 1y ago
> after a technical meeting .. I could To be fair, almost any form of one-on-one exchange looks really effective when you contrast it with the average badly-moderated, way-too-many-peoples-time-wasted-if-you-ask-questions, no-prepared-agenda, in-person meeting. One contrast I find more impressive is the valuable advice I received from people.. already dead for years. Skipping possibly helping 2 or 3 additional novices, by instead spending that time on refining a quick reply to one person into a reusable misconception-untangling guide. Useful to 100 more, for years to come. IMNSHO, if a company is not even encouraging such soft-skills via the easy pickings (like turning their buzzword-infested PR slopstream back into a proper technical weblog), they are not missing a key - they got too many locks confining available expert knowledge.