Technical Ramblings

Sometimes, I wish that I could talk more about work openly.

I do a fair amount of what I consider somewhat cool stuff at work — as is evidenced by my somewhat lower work in open source these days. (Since I find my work more interesting, I spend fewer of my off hours invested in ‘more interesting’ projects than I used to.) Of course, in reality, I expect that most people would still find what I do completely boring, but to me, it’s exciting.

In the past, when I worked for MetaCarta, there were only 20-30 people who would be in a position to be upset by what I would talk about — if I wanted to chat in public about something, I could usually chat with everyone who might care about it in an afternoon, and get a go/no-go from them.

But now, I work for a much larger company, and speaking out of turn could have much larger consequences. (Not the least is the fact that the company is publicly traded — so anything I say has the potential to actually shift a public stock price.) The group that I work in is significantly larger than MetaCarta’s core of engineers, and the number of levels between me and the top is comparatively larger.

So now, when I’m working on things that I consider cool, or want to share — I typically have to just keep my mouth shut.

Recently, one of my coworkers was trying to encourage someone from our team to present at the Berlin Buzzwords conference — talking about how good it would be to present some of what we do at the conference to get feedback from others working on the same problem. I couldn’t help but think, at the time: What exactly do you think that we could share at this conference?

Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but I feel a bit stymied by this regularly — even inside the organization, sharing data we’ve gathered becomes a political, rather than a technical, decision. Oversharing without consideration for how other teams will see the data is something that can have significant negative impacts on our interactions with other teams, because it’s very easy to step on toes.

I realize that this is all part of working in a large organization. Overall, there are a lot of positive benefits — in fact, much of the reason that I have more data that I’d like to share now is because we have a larger set of resources than we had available at MetaCarta, where many of the projects I worked on were just me hacking along on them alone. It doesn’t make it less frustrating, but it does swing both ways.

But sometimes I still just wish I could blab about what hack I spent my weekend on. Or open source another small project. And it’s a shame that I can’t.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.