"Trey Darley" <t...@kingfisherops.com> writes: > Suppose you have a junior colleague with bang-up technical skills but who > gets thrown off-track whenever things don't work as expected. Suppose this > person gets routinely blocked from working until a more senior person has > the availability to unblock them. Suppose this person routinely gets > blocked and it turns out that there is a common-sense workaround. What > would you do to help them to see the light?
I find that this problem, is usually a problem of expectations. /especially/ if you get someone who has had some kind of lower level support job before, or who doesn't have much experience out of school, they are expecting that the boss will get angry if they deviate from the script or from their training. You need to make it clear that there is no longer a script, and that their job is now, essentially, to figure things out. Be aware (and make it clear to the Junior) that this is permission to f-ck things up. Because s/he will. It's part of the learning process. Work with them to help them understand the things that are likely to break important things in bad ways, vs. things that are likely to not break important things in bad ways. But be aware that most of us will require some experience before we learn what is and is not likely to break things. I like to make it clear that I'm not going to fire you for breaking something, even if it's something really big, at least not the first time. but I /will/ fire you for breaking something and then trying to cover it up or shift the blame. The idea is that when you do break something, you need to come up with a way to prevent it from happening again. And you can't do that if you are pointing fingers and trying to dodge blame. For example, once I unplugged a production server while shifting things around in the data center. Ever since, on servers without power cord retention things, I make my own, with zipties. (now, I got lazy in recent years, and less consistent. And guess what? last week i accidentally unplugged a switch that didn't have any power retainer, and gave my larger customer a short period of downtime.) I understand there are other ways of solving this problem, like careful cable management, that's not the point. I'm just saying; teach the youngster that when he makes a mess, he's gotta figure out how to make sure it doesn't happen again; and that his answer doesn't have to match what you would do, it just has to solve the problem. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
