Foreign teams: 6. Learning teams

Because of the development progress of my team, I have some new ideas on efficiency issues. Before the thought summary is mature, I will temporarily stop talking about efficiency. I plan to write down other topics first.

 

What we bring to you today is a bit about the learning team.

As we all know, the fact is that domestic enterprises generally tend to recruit and use the resources, rather than training their own talents. After all, training talents must bear costs and risks. In the end, they may be dug up by other companies to make wedding dresses for others. Therefore, the so-called learning team should not be in touch with many colleagues in China.-Of course, many Chinese companies also claim to be "Learning teams" when recruiting ".

Many years ago, when I first joined the industry, I attended a certain Microsoft training course. When I heard Microsoft trainers introduce their corporate culture, one of them was very fascinating: Microsoft trainers said that developers at Microsoft headquarters, everyone can give a technical lecture on their favorite technologies at any time, book an office, send an internal announcement, and other interested colleagues can join and learn from each other. Their management not only does not block them because they are out of work during work hours, but even requires employees to attend/host at least several technical lectures each year.

In my understanding at the time, this kind of corporate culture should be the full expression of the so-called learning-type enterprises/learning-type teams-now I think it is a bit of a sense of confidence.

At that time, I was in a small company where new recruits were everywhere (of course I was also a new recruit). So I proposed to move Microsoft's routines into order to improve the abilities of everyone in the team. This proposal has also received considerable attention. The company allows (a small amount) of funds to purchase technical books for us and agrees that we will start a technical seminar on our own. However, technical learning is limited to off-duty time, and work hours are definitely not allowed to be used. However, this seemingly promising learning team cannot go any longer. In the past few times, several others will actively prepare for the topic of the technical discussion. In the future, we will have to assign this part of the wed this week and next week's round of Li Si. Then, we will be unable to get through, you can only stop it.

Are Chinese technical staff not fond of learning? Or are Chinese technicians reluctant to share? Or does it take off work hours to make everyone unhappy?

The answer to this question has been bothering me for many years! It was not until recently that I worked in a foreign team that I had rechecked my past failures.

It is actually another issue that allows me to rethink this issue. Someone often asks for various purposes: "Who has the best technology in your department ?"

What is "best? I'm afraid I cannot answer this question. Because none of the developers in the foreign team is the strongest. As mentioned in the previous section, the division of labor among foreigners is very detailed and their responsibilities are relatively scattered, those who are good at the front end, those who are good at the back end, those who are good at structure and analysis, those who are good at writing scripts for configuration management, those who are good at server maintenance, and those who are good at other fields. We can only say that, when doing something, someone is very strong, rather than simply saying that someone is the strongest in the team. (In fact, if the most powerful person in the team exists, he will take the initiative to leave the team. I will mention it later)

In contrast, the working atmosphere in China is more integrated with the great tradition of Chinese education-you are not allowed to be eccentric, and you are not allowed to be lame!

EachProgramIn our words, employees are all "one-stop" in their education, interview, and actual work ". It is best to understand databases, development, and even front-end JS and flat ps. Otherwise, the interview must be closed! In China, only the "cool" experts can be regarded as elites and become core members of the team. Rather than elites, they often learn from their elite colleagues with a mentality of aligning themselves with the elites. This bad education habit directly affects the Advanced Path of domestic practitioners.

Return to the failed self-organizational learning experience in the new age. It is not hard to find that the reason why Microsoft can take turns to give lectures is that they have a clear division of labor and everyone can talk about things that others don't know, no one can learn from others. The reason why we cannot get through the road of self-learning is precisely because of a group of new recruits (even with veterans) the knowledge structure completely overlaps, and no one can tell new tricks that others do not know.

In this case, if there are two veterans and masters, will the situation be better?

This is exactly one of the reasons for our failure (not the main reason )!

In our current team, the best technology is undoubtedly CTO (Swedish Foreigner), but this guy has never been involved in our specific development tasks. It can be said that most of the time he does not do technology. It seems that this situation is also common in Chinese companies, but I feelCauseAndResultThey are completely different from those of foreign citizens.

CTO of domestic teams or so-called veterans often fall into the role of a fireman. Even in many ChineseManagementThe course also teaches them how to break away from the fireman's identity. It is not hard to imagine that the large number of junior, intermediate, and senior programmers who are eager to "Learn" in the team are all looking forward to learning from superiors with more "authoritative" and "powerful" technologies, how can superiors at all levels get rid of the Fire Brigade's identity? If you want to get rid of it, you can only let it go!

I have recently experienced this. I transferred my old team to a foreign team and accepted a task to migrate a website from server a to server B. The leaders asked me to participate in the support just in case so that they could not solve the problem. In fact, it is quite easy to copy databases, copy website folders, and reset DNS. It should not exceed the capabilities of any technical personnel. However, a problem still occurred. After someone copies the database and the website folder, the database connection string is not modified, and the result is self-evident. However, he neither reported nor attempted to anyone until I asked him how he was doing. Then he told me in a vague manner that "a problem occurred and he couldn't run "! I thought it was a very troublesome situation. I checked the results, but it was only 30 seconds to solve the problem.

This story makes me believe that if a team is absolutely authoritative, other members will surely be comfortable with the status quo, stop their brains, and let authoritative members guide themselves in doing things! You can learn other people's skills and do not have to take responsibility for them. What a Chinese value is!

Therefore, it is advantageous for the strongest technical staff to leave the team to a certain extent. To avoid shirking, everyone's mind is moving, and the result is naturally more efficient than two heads directing a group of typists!

Of course, leaving the team does not mean being a hacker. There are many such CTO in China. In order to break away from the role of the fire-fighting team, they can "check" only on several key nodes ". Such teams often complain that leaders are not responsible, give command, and be perfunctory. Once a dispute or quality problem arises, the CTO will blame him for making him "black back "! Although our foreign CTO does not intervene in our development process at ordinary times, it will appear at our morning meeting every day. In addition, when multiple teams develop together, the CTO will participate in every morning meeting of all teams. When a team encounters a bad phenomenon or problem, the CTO will come up-instead of standing up for Responsibility Identification after the problem arises.

Summary:

The so-called learning team is definitely a good thing, because it can improve the team's combat effectiveness. What we need to know is why it is difficult or rare for Chinese companies to have really learning teams.

1. Chinese enterprises like to use a dedicated team of people, or even a non-dedicated team of people. The Team division is relatively rough, leading to a large overlap in the knowledge structure of Chinese technicians, and the possibility of mutual learning is relatively small, after mutual understanding, you will often find that the difference between others and yourself is not much, and there is nothing new. Foreign teams, for example, Microsoft, in my example, are learning between experts and experts. They are truly endless learning.

2. Based on the above point of view, foreign programmers (only in Europe, America, Japan, and Russia, the stream of curry countries can be ignored) are superior in their specialization direction to Chinese programmers. In the traditional words accepted by family members, they are "lame ". However, this is an advantage. It is really an advantage! By comparing a Chinese team with a foreign team with all the legs, you will find that the Chinese team can only perform basic tasks (even outsourcing is not necessarily competent ), foreign teams can always master core technologies.

3. Do not trust the ox or the ox enterprise. Not only do you have the idea of following the leaders to learn, but the leaders will be bored by you and leave your hands alone. Try to make yourself an expert in a small field and see how it works! The simplest way is to buy books and read books. Don't be too expensive! There are some old saying in China: reading good books, reading good books, and reading good books!

4. employee learning is beneficial to the enterprise. Even if the employee changes, it is still beneficial to the industry. At least it can be said to be beneficial to China. Therefore, some foreign companies can use their work hours to learn from their employees, which is beneficial to the company and the industry in general. In comparison, Chinese companies are much more childish! Due to national conditions, the management philosophy is to be improved!

5. Learn the best! Don't look down on new people, or have any sense of inferiority to the experts!

2012-09-09 22:37:20