This sat in my drafts for a couple years. ===== I had a flippant reply to this tweet. And then I spiraled thinking about it. By the end of ice ages, humanity hunted large mammals like mammoths to extinction. We also eliminated giant sloths, sabertooth tigers, among others. Hunting these creatures required cooperation, coordination, planning,…
I tend to overcommunicate to my supervisors and teammates. I’d rather they get something they already knew from me, than they get blindsided. That’s played well with several of my bosses and shadow bosses. They often tell me, “thanks, I already know about it.” For my side, that brings relief instead of discouragement. When they…
We talk quite a bit at work about technical debt. We typically think about all the things we have to keep updated and how so much of our time gets sucked into them. The real problems are the unknown things lurking where one person knows how they work that are fragile and good enough. Until…
While discussing an update with a colleague via Microsoft Teams about an Excel file he doesn’t have access to—an email referencing a tangentially related conversation in a channel he doesn’t have access to arrived—it struck me how fragmented our digital communication has become. Information is dispersed across emails, chats, and channels, making it increasingly difficult…
Something I’ve noticed over the years is more “thank you”s in late November through mid-December. It might have something to do with Thanksgiving. Starting about Monday before and running at least a couple weeks after, I notice supervisors, mentors, and clients express more pointed expressions of thanks. That’s not to say I don’t see them…
In work chats, I love that someone will put a thumbs up on a message rather than respond. I will hover over it to see who acknowledged it. To me it means, “what was communicated is complete. No questions. No additional feedback.” Probably it just means, “I accept this, but don’t want to drag this…
The funny thing about being a technocrat is the goal is to end my work. Create solutions for everything, but in a true Moving The Goal Post situation. As soon as one has crafted the solution, there are improvements needed. As soon as it is perfect, there are new business processes and objectives. And then…
Semantic Drain and the Meaninglessness of Modern Work makes an interesting point that a problem with knowledge management work is that much of is filler work without a fulfilling purpose. I was far more stressed as the university webmaster than as a database administrator. The webmaster job was highly subjective with people getting upset about…