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On Being Indispensable

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Re: On Being Indispensable

#291

Post by lupire »

BigJono wrote: post #69
sdoering wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe companies need some kind of "Chaos Monkey" system [0] in place for regular employees. Not in "terminating" random employee's contracts, but a culture were regular, maybe even some kind of random transferals onto other projects, or onto internal work regularly happens. Everybody knows this and everybody should be prepared to a situation that tomorrow they are not working on the same problem they work on today. H…

Nah, this isn't a great idea. It's not that far off what most companies do anyway. I think most companies have a misunderstanding of what the problem is. The problem isn't that a particular piece of knowledge isn't distributed, it's that all the knowledge isn't distributed (because it resides with one person). You don't want to go crazy with duplicating knowledge amongst the team, you just want to split it up. One he…

N single points of failure is far worse than 1.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#292

Post by BigJono »

lupire wrote: post #291
BigJono wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, this isn't a great idea. It's not that far off what most companies do anyway. I think most companies have a misunderstanding of what the problem is. The problem isn't that a particular piece of knowledge isn't distributed, it's that all the knowledge isn't distributed (because it resides with one person). You don't want to go crazy with duplicating knowledge amongst the team, you just want to split it up. One he…

N single points of failure is far worse than 1.

Depends what the failure is. If the important stuff is scattered around 20 different devs, one leaving is significantly less of a problem. I'd much rather piece together what someone was doing on one piece of work than have to try and piece together an entire 20 person project because the only one that knew how to drive the project left.

Also, if you own code and are responsible for it, part of that responsibliity should be making sure you have someone with just enough knowledge of the code to take it over should you leave. That's far more feasible if you own a small piece of it than if you own an entire code base.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#293

Post by pferde »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #160
pferde wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that's because the space contains so many duplicate or almost duplicate articles that search results have no chance of being good. I see the problem in the searched content, not in the search engine itself.

The internet also contains "so mamy duplicate or almost duplicate" articles, and yet Google can provide a useful search for Internet articles. You're telling me it's somehow impossible to achieve the same thing for a company's intra - even though it has several orders of magnitude fewer articles to index? One quick and easy way to improve Confluence's search would be to rank often-visited articles higher than rarely-…

I would hope that going by popularity is something a search engine WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT DO in a corporate setting. This is a completely different scenario than what we have on the public WWW, so unless your corporation has a situation where people maliciously copy articles from others, trying to pass them off as their own content, in which case the search engine quality is the least of your problems. :)

Anyway, as I've already stated, Confluence spaces which are well looked after and are not allowed to get cluttered are a delight to search in, and as a bonus also a delight to just browse through.

P.S. Google Search results are often lousy and full of low quality results anyway, I'm not sure mentioning it makes your point as well as you think it does. As everywhere - crap goes in, crap comes out. :)

Re: On Being Indispensable

#294

Post by goodpoint »

iamacyborg wrote: post #264
pc86 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist. Being a good human being more often than not (occasional bad moods notwithstanding) should be a non-functional requirement for any job where you interact with other people. I have no problem with anyone, in any role, getting fired simply for being an asshole. The…

Since when is not smiling at people being an arsehole? I don’t want a bus driver to fake cheerfulness. He’s there to get me from a to b, not to pretend to be my friend.

You keep confusing being polite (something rightfully expected from an employee) with being fake and with real emotional labor.

This are 3 different things.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#296

Post by baobabKoodaa »

pferde wrote: post #293
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet also contains "so mamy duplicate or almost duplicate" articles, and yet Google can provide a useful search for Internet articles. You're telling me it's somehow impossible to achieve the same thing for a company's intra - even though it has several orders of magnitude fewer articles to index? One quick and easy way to improve Confluence's search would be to rank often-visited articles higher than rarely-…

I would hope that going by popularity is something a search engine WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT DO in a corporate setting. This is a completely different scenario than what we have on the public WWW, so unless your corporation has a situation where people maliciously copy articles from others, trying to pass them off as their own content, in which case the search engine quality is the least of your problems. :) Anyway, as I'v…

Personally I haven't seen "well looked after" Confluence spaces. I have experience with 4 different companies that used Confluence for their infra, and in my experience it has always been a mess. The reason I advocated for ranking by popularity is that those messy Confluence pages are filled to the brim with obsolete outdated articles that nobody intentionally visits. For example, in many firms people post meeting notes to Confluence. So you have 10 000 pages of quality "notes from project abc weekly meeting 5.4.2014". Now, imagine yourself searching a Confluence space like that. You type in a particular phrase, and there is a perfect match in meeting notes from 2017, a perfect match from preliminary design document from 2013, etc. These results constantly drown out the actual pages you are searching for, which are typically more actively-updated, more recent pages. It would be a huge improvement to rank these pages higher purely based on their popularity.
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