Tag: Tacit Knowledge

Smoking Area Knowledge and Remote Work

If career growth matters, 100% remote is a trap
byu/roseba inunpopularopinion

Apprehensive_Ruin692
I think this is true. It depends on the company but in person interactions matter to a lot of people.

HighTurning
I remember my colleagues talking about how back then “Smoking area knowledge” was a thing, where basically only the smokers would get to know specifics about the company or job because people would go there and overshare lol

I feel it’s probably the same, if your team has a bunch of people getting together at the office and you are not there you are probably missing out.

snarky_answer
Same thing happens for lower enlisted in the military. The “smoke pit” is where lower enlisted and upper enlisted/officers mingle on somewhat more equal footing and knowledge gets spread by oversharing or given on the down low. That info the propagates out via the “lance corporal” underground before any official word is usually given.

sethra007
IIRC, this was one of the reasons behind changes in laws that allowed women access to certain types of men’s-only clubs. So many men conducted business on golf courses and during lunches or drinks at those clubs that it was shutting women out of opportunities.

Tacit Knowledge and IT

Tacit Knowledge
…

Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. For example, that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of explicit knowledge that can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient. However, the ability to speak a language, knead dough, play a musical instrument, or design and use complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge that is not always known explicitly, even by expert practitioners, and which is difficult or impossible to explicitly transfer to other people.

– Wikipedia.

How much of working in an IT environment is tacitly learned? How much of that can be made explicit?

UI Development – How should a new item look? It should fit in. What does that mean? You should just know. What’s appropriate on a site for insurance companies vs what is appropriate for a site for surfing gear? Same thing, you should know by experience.

A common one – learning how the existing software works is often tacit. You get a ticket to modify some existing functionality. How it currently works, how it’s supposed to work, how to run it, what problems are known vs what problems are new. How often is all that directly explained?