jr conlin's ink stained banana

i'm not exactly sure i wanted to know that i'm currently the number four result for the search phrase "How to stop thinking".

And i'm sure i'd have something witty to say about it, if i could think of it.

Ye Newe York Times reports on postwar difficulties following victory at Yorktown.

For the Triumph over the Britiƒh Empire was the Easy part.

Michael has been asking about how to capture Tribal Knowledge. These are the legends and lore that are passed down from the elder Geeks to those new to the tribe. Usually while gathered around the sacred coffee pot near the still smoking remains of the dual cpu rack box they hunted that day.

Still, the question bears consideration.

One of the larger aspects to any organization is how to effectively bring someone up to speed and not lose momentum from the rest of the team. With any organization, there are certain tools, guidelines, procedures and other sacred tools of the shaman that need to handed down. Not doing so guarantees that things break, tempers flare, and things grind to a halt anyway.

So far folks have been putting up suggestions for things like Blogs, WIKI, online documentation and other solutions, which (being a document kinda guy) i agree have their place. i'll also concede that anything written will age, be ignored, or be lost either due to spurious comment or poor filing.

At work, we already have a fairly sizable amount of documentation. A few years ago i took a stab at trying to organize it, but had to give up when i couldn't devote all of my time to the task. A few other brave (and far smarter) souls did manage to continue up on that task, and i have to admit that things are far easier now than they were before. We still lack a cohesive index of all the content. Kind of ironic considering where i work.

So where am i going with this?

i actually think that the solution to effectively bringing someone up to speed is not to just whip them into the deep end of the ocean. One of the things that i've learned is that new folks both learn and teach. All too often, they may be elders, but that doesn't mean that they're smarter. Likewise, there may also be a damn good reason that we're not doing things the smarter way and it's best to catch it early so new guy doesn't waste his time/get frustrated/fling poop at the tribe.

What i'd suggest is that each new hire get a mentor. Yes, that means that your most productive worker loses a few days while he helps deal with someone new. Trust me, it's worth every minute. Mentor spends those days working with young brave, answering questions, introducing the person to the various shaman he needs to meet, etc. Likewise Mentor gets to see what problems young brave is facing, and has the leverage to get people to update documents, remove old crap, make changes so that next new brave has it easier.

Ultimately, this is probably the reason that the Aztecs didn't hand folks spears and point them at an Obelisk.

At least until the Spanish showed up, but i don't think that model would fly here.

i'm of two minds when i first heard about The Fat-Kreme, the first involved the World Health Organization imposing a quarantine to ensure that it doesn't get out.

The second was that there's probably a huge line of folks waiting to try it.

Each and every one of them holding a Mocha Double Frappachino.