How do you share knowledge in your company?

Question

Sharing knowledge has always been a difficult task in the companies that I worked for. Surprisingly, it's something that everybody wants and still very hard to achieve. I see companies paying for courses and books, but people sharing what they&acute;ve learned is difficult to see (at least in my experience).Some ways of sharing the knowledge I tried is: - Start study groups, where at each meeting someone is accountable for the topic; - Some kind of "programming/technology drops", where people post on Slack what they've learned; - Open tech talks schedule where everyone can show something.I would like to hear from you what strategy do you or your company use to spread knowledge of general technologies or stuff that only applies to the context of the team. Also, how to find ways of engaging people in doing so. Thanks!

manx · Accepted Answer

I established a random pairing concept at our company (~15 people). It goes like this: Every week a little script takes all names, produces random pairings of co-workers and posts them to slack. The goal is that everybody should communicate with everybody else on a regular basis, even if they're not working on the same things. The time investment is 1/person/week right now. The response so far is very positive. People learn a lot and enjoy it.

quantumofalpha · Answer

At one of previous gigs we had weekly newsletters organized and edited by our VP. Besides org-wide news it typically featured 1-2 freshly written in-depth articles about some piece of our system or project by engineers who worked on it. An archive of these posts served nicely as a repository of knowledge: if you needed to know how some component worked, often there was an article there by experts involved, even if somewhat dated, giving you enough background and pointers to get started. The background stories were especially interesting e.g. giving you some historical context why something exists and was designed this way, which is often missing from other forms of technical documentation.

tcbasche · Answer

A team I worked in would pair program on like 80% of tasks. Sometimes it was laborious (and exhausting) but it meant people could disappear and there would be no knowledge gaps.

markus_zhang · Answer

Wikis and Teams training meetings. Wikis are sort of useful for simpler things and on-boarding (but I do prefer a script for installing the software). Training meetings are a must for anything beyond these.

sdevonoes · Answer

Companies are starting to behave as primary schools: let's start study groups! Let's do some tech talks! Let's do hackathons!
As a professional developer with some years of experience in this industry, I call this BS. Companies even put this kind of "events" in their job offers (as if that would attract people!). Let me do my job, if I need to collaborate with people of other teams, I will do so; if some knowledge "needs to be share", then I will do so... I don't need your support, company X.
Many of the people I have met in the past (senior engineers) consider these kind of events as huge red flag.