How to Work With David

Everyone is different, with their own unique interests and quirks. If you can tailor your interactions for each of your colleagues, you can get more out of them. If you make it easy for your colleagues to understand and adjust to you, they can get more out of you. In both cases, you end up with a more productive and enjoyable environment.

This post is my attempt to make it easier for my colleagues to understand and adjust to me. I wish to provide to anyone who works with me, the tools to get the most out of me. It builds upon (but does not depend upon) my previous post on learnings about myself. Additionally, I hope that this post may provide you with tools to work with anyone who happens to be like me, as well as the inspiration to share your own guide so that I may adjust to you.

My son standing on a wooden bridge on a hiking trail. He built the bridge with my help.

Special Places

At the Café by Edouard Manet from the Google Arts & Culture via Wikipedia

Los Alamos, SRI’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC), Café Guerbois at the beginning of Impressionism. For the right person, each was a special place. What must it have been like to be at Los Alamos with Fermi, Feynman, and others for the Manhattan Project? Or to be at the Augmentation Research Center for the development of the future of personal computing including the mouse, the graphical user interface, and video conferencing (culminating in the Mother of All Demos)? Or to be in the Café Guerbois with Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, and others for the birth of Impressionism? Just imagine the ideas and excitement that must have been in the air in each place.

You cannot go to any of those places today. Sure, there’s still a research lab at Los Alamos and the ideas of ARC are everywhere. But those exciting, special times are in the past. Special places don’t just exist in a place, they also exist in a time. It is easy to mourn that these special places no longer exist. I think this is misguided. Instead, we should celebrate that they ever existed!

Peer Groups in the Workplace

I have learned a lot through peer groups, both industry wide and company internal ones. Company internal peer groups offer a unique opportunity to help you get better at your job. However, there are not yet good resources for running company internal peer groups. This post includes what I have been able to learn on the topic so far. My hope is that this post can serve as a starting point, and we can, as a community, develop those resources.

Creating and Fostering Communities at Work

Some days I feel that the most valuable thing I’ve done at MongoDB has been to create slack channels. 

I know that may sound absurd to those who know me professionally (I have done a lot at MongoDB, for example, developing our performance testing infrastructure and changing the way we spot performance changes in our testing environment), but bear with me for a moment. I have started a lot of slack channels, such as: #fountainpens, #greatoutdoors, #cookie-club, #staffplusengineering, #academic-research, #writing, #performance. And I spend time on those channels sharing pictures and stories with colleagues as well as talking shop.  My wife has said she wants to join MongoDB just so she can join the slack channels. However, the channels themselves aren’t important – what’s important is creating and fostering communities.