Habit 4: Never Share Information

Lessons from Lord of the Rings, why you really did learn all you needed to know in Kindergarten and the value of opening your kimono.

Seven Habits of Highly Dysfunctional Enterprise Developers:

  1. Blame Everyone But Yourself
  2. Confuse Motion With Action
  3. Use Complexity To Demonstrate Intelligence
  4. Keep Important Information Secret And Safe
  5. Fix It Later
  6. Reuse Is Overrated
  7. Principles Are More Important Than Results

Keep Important Information Secret And Safe

All that knowledge you’ve worked hard to acquire over the years…it should be jealously guarded, like a treasure in a cave.  Never shared.  My PREH-SHUSSSSS!

Filthy Colleagues-es!  They wants the Precious!
Filthy Colleagues-es! They wants the Precious!

Who are you, Gollum?  You may remember it didn’t work out so well for him.

The best developers actively share and disseminate their practices, tricks, tips and past pitfalls with everyone and anyone who will listen.  They teach and mentor new developers, write good documentation (OK, they at least write it…), send emails to the team letting them know about new tools and techniques for making things better.  They do Brown Bag seminars talking about the latest project and how it was useful to them, the company, or their peers.  They see problems in training and make up for it by creating Wikis for new team members.

There is no point in holding on to useful information that could make others better developers.  That is, unless you’re trying to stay in the same job forever.  Ask yourself, who do you want to work with on your next job?  The person who helped you write that complex algorithm on their lunch break, or the guy who hissed at you when you walked into his cube:  “Mine!  Stay away, filthy Hobbitses”.

Yeah, I thought so.