Is there ever a case for the Knowledge Silo?
Tags: codenewbie, siliconvalley, beginners
Published: 2021-04-22 16:06:25

I fell down a rabbit hole into a fascinating debate recently. 
Techies from across the globe were arguing over the validity of knowledge silo-ing. I'm a n00b in this world and I have been taught - both from a technical and a business point of view - that this is a thing of the past. The theory goes that in industries like manufacturing, the senior staff are those with the most experience. You make furniture for thirty years - you get great at making furniture. You have experience. You teach others, but you are valued very highly not jus tfor your teaching, but for your learned instinct. The furniture making process, therefore the industry, has not changed greatly in decades and your knowledge is relevant and valuable. 

In tech, however, we are supposed to be more like those in the field of medicine. Advances in medicine are celebrated and as soon as it is safe to do so, integrated into the field. New skills are learned by young doctors and people would value someone with fewer years' medical experience if they had "better", more up to date procedures under their belt. Obviously I am not suggesting everyone wants to be sliced and diced by a kid out of med school, but Greys Anatomy has taught us we don't want the cardio guy with fifty years experience and a crank to hold open our chest if we can have Cristina Yang with ten years and a laproscopic procedure. The metaphor is that modernity is valued.

Programming, it holds, should follow a similar pattern. There are technologies widely available now that ten years ago were pipe dreams. They're smart, secure, useful, time-saving. And young devs cut their teeth on them. 

When these baby devs get dropped into a large company with senior staff who have become senior through years of service - and yes, experience - what should happen?

As I said, I've been taught that the system doesn't work like it used to. That knowledge is shared and the top-down heirarchy in tech companies died in the early 2000s. To an extent, I have seen this in my workplace. I have also seen the most flagrant gatekeeping and insecurity in more senior staff. I was hoping this was anomalous but let me pass over some quotes from the thread I found:

Poster 1 : "If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability".

Poster 2: "Sorry, this is just wrong. You are a liability if someone thinks about you that way. Fortunately, not that many people are like that. In Contrary, if you are the only one to know something then you are regarded very highly and almost untouchable."

Eye roll. 

"Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job."

There are many more. Enough for this to be clearly still a very prevalent paradigm. I have found that for me the old "see one, do one, teach one" has worked very nicely, and I am never happier than helping someone else figure out how to solve a problem that I too struggled with. But I am wondering how prepared I need to be, in this big bad world, to fight to stay that way! 
 

This is the link, if you want to grab a coffee and exercise your eyebrows (mine must have got stuck somewhere near my hairline for fifteen solid minutes) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26721951