So, what are they going to need to know? The projects I'm working on, of course. But also who was involved with which dataset, and why they needed such-and-such an access, and who promised us what... Lots of things that I don't think of until the need arises; things "out of sight, out of mind"(*). When the secondary backup server went queep and died, where did we archive a snapshot of the Projects tree?
Chesterton's fence is alive and well in research IT. "You don't know what that's for? I don't care if you're out of space, don't delete it until you know what it did." And who's left who knows? Me. Somewhere in the mental filing cabinet...
(*) Back in the late sixties/very early seventies I read an anecdote of one of the early efforts at machine translation--between English and Russian. The researchers tried the idiom "out of sight, out of mind", but there weren't any Russian speakers that afternoon, so they ran the result back through the Russian-to-English process--and got "invisible maniac". That's become a household byword for forgotten things.
I wondered this as I was working part-time after retirement, what they would do when when they no longer had me to ask. Yet I had also observed a few others before me with even deeper roots and highly specialised expertise that were left uncunsulted, and then left themselves, seldom mourned. Also, I found they also did not ask me even while I was still there, just plowing ahead and doing dumb stuff that went bad. After 2-3 of those people were embarrassed and stopped coming around altogether, even though I was very conscious of not being judgemental. The department supervisors - people who had not heretofore been my greatest supporters - kept imploring people to just ask me, and would even send trainees my way - a lot - even though I was the least-credentialed person for a dozen kilometers in any direction. To no avail. By the time I left I had decided that the prejudice of "but he's an old guy who doesn't even know who's on American Idol, and he didn't even go to my graduate school" was going to prevent them from getting the information they needed - forever. I have not looked back.
ReplyDeleteMaybe your group is wiser and more appreciative.
I think they are. Nobody knows everything, and we ask each other a lot of questions. And we get along very well.
ReplyDelete