The joy of sharing knowledge

I'm sitting here in my garden writing this post because we're in the middle of a bit of a heatwave in the UK and who wouldn't want to make the most of that? I'm a bit behind with my post because I was going to write about a different topic originally but that ended up spinning out into a longer, more technical post (coming soon, promise!). I feel a bit of a ramble coming on so bear with me - there might be a point at the end!

Basically, I was reflecting on what I'd done this week and one of the big things was a knowledge sharing session on Panda CSS with my team. I prepared a bit of a presentation and talked through it, encouraging folks to interrupt if they had anything they wanted to say, and everyone who attended was very engaged and asked excellent questions, which meant it was a great chat!

Afterwards, I found myself thinking about the importance of sharing knowledge as a Senior Engineer. The best Senior+ Engineers I've worked with have been the ones who have been willing to share what they know and give everyone around them a boost. I have heard this referred to as a "multiplier" - i.e. not just someone who does their own work and does it well, but shares their skills with other people, making everyone else's work better.

It also made me reflect on times when I have worked at places where sharing knowledge was not the norm. Engineers were not keen to do talks or would not want to share their knowledge for fear of not being "indispensable" any more. I get it - usually this is a cultural issue rather than an individual one. Knowledge sharing isn't valued and the culture is such that being "indispensable" is seen as a good thing (I'd argue it really is not).

I was going to title this post "The importance of sharing knowledge" but there is a reason I changed it to "joy", because I really do think it's an honour and a joy to share my experience with my colleagues and see them grow. Explaining something to someone and seeing a lightbulb go on in their head is a fantastic feeling to me and I wonder whether more people would be willing to share their wisdom if they reframed it like this.

I know some folks are naturally better at being kick ass programmers who know ten programming languages really well and can write a binary tree algorithm in their sleep, but teaching is a skill that can be learned, so there is no reason why even those people can't share what they know. And I would hope that even they would find it rewarding.

Anyway, if you know something that your colleagues don't (and you don't have to be Senior level for this!), I'd encourage you to share it. It doesn't have to be a presentation like I did, it could even just be a post on Slack or a "guess what I found out" in the chat before standup. You might just find yourself experiencing some joy in seeing your colleagues take what you learned and us it in their day-to-day.