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Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

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Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#71

Post by ekidd »

tikhonj wrote: post #11

Tacit knowledge is inevitable... but it's also different from what this article is about. Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge (and skill!) that cannot be fully explained or taught in words—think mechanical skills you can only pick up through physical practice or very context-specific expertise you only get through experience. In programming good taste is crucial and entirely tacit: we can try to distill taste in…

> very context-specific expertise you only get through experience.

When giving advice, I'm often tempted to point to a given situation, and to explain what rule of thumb I used to solve it.

But then I would see a junior programmer applying the rule of thumb in a completely different situation and I'd want to say, "No, that will end in tears!" And I realized that a lot of my rules of thumb were really dumb when taken out of context.

As far as I can tell, a huge part of expertise is having a large set of mappings like:

- In contexts like "C1", use rule of thumb "R1" or "R8".

It's very tempting to talk about R1, R2, etc. You can write blog posts like, "How R2 will transform your team!"

But a lot of real expertise comes from being able to say, "Oh, this is a combination of C7 and C78, so I should consider rules of thumb R7, R49 and R102. Ah, wait, no, R49 is just gross here."

So I've learned that, when mentoring, I need to spend a lot more time talking about the context before proposing any rules of thumb.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#72

Post by krisoft »

sonicanatidae wrote: post #26
hoherd wrote: post #17

At a previous company where I had a lot of this "tacit knowledge", I had made a policy for myself. Whenever somebody asked me a question over IM or e-mail, I would look in the wiki. If the answer was not in the wiki, I would write a new wiki article or update an existing article with the answer, and I would respond with a link to the article, and a statement like "if this doesn't answer your question let me know what…

How do you keep your wiki from evolving into a kludge of random-ish info? One example of tacit knowledge is knowing the Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers and often, this can cook them over time, requiring replacement or, at least repasting the heatsink. Now imagine 100s of those little tidbits. Useful, but hard to categorize.

> One example of tacit knowledge is knowing the Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers and often, this can cook them over time, requiring replacement or, at least repasting the heatsink.

I don't even think that is tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is how do you know when the edge of your chisel is too dull and need re-honing. (It feels off.) Or knowing how much weight transfer you need to safely navigate a given turn with a motorcycle.

Or to grab a more similar example: Tacit knowledge is looking at a computer case you have never seen before and thinking "that doesn't look like enough cooling, we should calculate and check".

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#73

Post by geodel »

pheres wrote: post #65
fidotron wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. This article confuses tacit knowledge for the phenomenon most eloquently described by a former (superb) sysadmin colleague “documentation is the enemy of job security”.

One should not look to be unreplaceable, but rather the opposite. Only when you become replaceable at a certain task (or able to delegate it) you can progress to do new (more interesting) things.

It could go either way. Some places will like and promote one to do different/more interesting things. Other places will eliminate the position with k, thx, bye! Moreover usually people have only so much energy to be always concerned with job / career growth/ changes etc. They are fine their little pieces of knowledge that make them useful at work in a unique way.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#74

Post by breischl »

j45 wrote: post #51
hoherd wrote: post #17

At a previous company where I had a lot of this "tacit knowledge", I had made a policy for myself. Whenever somebody asked me a question over IM or e-mail, I would look in the wiki. If the answer was not in the wiki, I would write a new wiki article or update an existing article with the answer, and I would respond with a link to the article, and a statement like "if this doesn't answer your question let me know what…

Another nice hack is to record a video as an answer, and put in the wiki doc, and then email a link to the wiki doc. The explanation by IM/em can be troublesome because it could be out of date. Helping your organization be creators is the way to go.

I know many people love video, but I personally think this is only slightly better than not recording it anywhere. Video is much harder to search and nearly impossible to skim, so it's difficult to use for anything other than a classroom-style "let's sit down and learn" session.

Most often I'm looking for some particular piece of information. Finding a video that _may_ contain the answer _somewhere_ in the hour (or whatever) of information just means now I have to decide on the likelihood that it'll be worth trying to watch.

Yes, some things are better explained in video format. But not very many, especially in knowledge work.

ETA: Also video is much harder to update as the situation changes. For the most part you just need to re-record the whole thing, which probably isn't going to happen.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#75

Post by travisjungroth »

er4hn wrote: post #61
travisjungroth wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a very similar comment and you beat me to it by one minute! Deleted and reposted below for compactness. Their usage of “tacit knowledge” is different from the most common usage. Tacit knowledge ≠ tribal knowledge. Tacit knowledge isn’t knowledge that no one has bothered to write down. It’s knowledge that is inherently difficult to write down. Riding a bike is tacit knowledge. Knowing when a class is doing “to…

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 exam…

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

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?

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#76

Post by stillwithit »

There’s less knowledge needed to manage these systems than we want to believe.

Tech is mired in hustle culture, which means it’s generating a lot of useless “knowledge” to role-play hustle.

Over engineering re-engineering to justify business headcount, importance, and prestige is a bigger danger in tech than the one this article points out

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#77

Post by sonicanatidae »

krisoft wrote: post #72
sonicanatidae wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you keep your wiki from evolving into a kludge of random-ish info? One example of tacit knowledge is knowing the Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers and often, this can cook them over time, requiring replacement or, at least repasting the heatsink. Now imagine 100s of those little tidbits. Useful, but hard to categorize.

> One example of tacit knowledge is knowing the Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers and often, this can cook them over time, requiring replacement or, at least repasting the heatsink. I don't even think that is tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is how do you know when the edge of your chisel is too dull and need re-honing. (It feels off.) Or knowing how much weight transfer you nee…

This gets muddy real fast.

One could argue that tacit knowledge also applies when it comes to the feel of pulling laptops apart without breaking the tiny little clips. It takes a few before you get the feel for it, because the difference between snapping a tiny little case clip and not snapping it are about 1 psi (borrowing a term) difference..lol

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#78

Post by panarky »

chongli wrote: post #55
tikhonj wrote: post #11

Tacit knowledge is inevitable... but it's also different from what this article is about. Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge (and skill!) that cannot be fully explained or taught in words—think mechanical skills you can only pick up through physical practice or very context-specific expertise you only get through experience. In programming good taste is crucial and entirely tacit: we can try to distill taste in…

I think almost all knowledge is tacit knowledge. Even stuff that would seem obviously explicit like mathematics and language. In my experience tutoring high school students, I’ve encountered plenty of students who struggle with spelling, grammar, or mathematical mistakes and no matter how many times I correct them it doesn’t stick. Then I see other students who pick these things up so quickly without correction. Math…

>> Tacit knowledge is not documented because it is undocumentable

> students who struggle with spelling

The ability to spell correctly is not tacit knowledge.

>> Tacit knowledge is not documented because it is undocumentable

Spelling is thoroughly documented.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#79

Post by quacked »

chongli wrote: post #55
tikhonj wrote: post #11

Tacit knowledge is inevitable... but it's also different from what this article is about. Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge (and skill!) that cannot be fully explained or taught in words—think mechanical skills you can only pick up through physical practice or very context-specific expertise you only get through experience. In programming good taste is crucial and entirely tacit: we can try to distill taste in…

I think almost all knowledge is tacit knowledge. Even stuff that would seem obviously explicit like mathematics and language. In my experience tutoring high school students, I’ve encountered plenty of students who struggle with spelling, grammar, or mathematical mistakes and no matter how many times I correct them it doesn’t stick. Then I see other students who pick these things up so quickly without correction. Math…

> I’ve encountered plenty of students who struggle with spelling, grammar, or mathematical mistakes and no matter how many times I correct them it doesn’t stick. Then I see other students who pick these things up so quickly without correction.

I often wonder about this. I believe that each person has a certain intellectual threshold beyond which they cannot progress farther in (memory, spatial reasoning, logical reasoning, learning speed, etc.) Logically there are genetic and natural components to this threshold. I also think part of what makes a lot of modern life so disastrously ineffective is the belief by those running society that everyone can reach a similar intellectual level given the right "system".

However, I think modern schooling is so brutally ineffective that barely anyone in school is operating near the real limits of their intellect. What do you think was holding those kids back? Lack of motivation, poor knowledge of fundamentals, or do you think basic high school concepts actually had maxed out their intellect?

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#80

Post by sonicanatidae »

j45 wrote: post #47
sonicanatidae wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you keep your wiki from evolving into a kludge of random-ish info? One example of tacit knowledge is knowing the Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers and often, this can cook them over time, requiring replacement or, at least repasting the heatsink. Now imagine 100s of those little tidbits. Useful, but hard to categorize.

Not OP, but you have to regularly review and adjust the ontology regularly as more articles are added. In short, the categorization and organization is key, and you have to do it when the number of documents is not only increasing, but different enough. Sometimes, I just write a longer document and once it's ready, it can be broken into smaller ones. Doing this helps save the organization tremendous amounts of time i…

Sure, but this then becomes a fulltime role by itself, once the info grows enough.

I maintain it for my teams, but as things grow, it becomes less manageable, since I'm also a T3 and have technical tasks to address, as well management of the teams.

The good news in all of this, is in less than a decade, it'll all be someone else's headache. ;)

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