{"id":1484,"date":"2013-09-12T01:41:50","date_gmt":"2013-09-12T06:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=1484"},"modified":"2013-09-01T15:01:58","modified_gmt":"2013-09-01T20:01:58","slug":"going-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2013\/09\/going-dark\/","title":{"rendered":"Going Dark"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n<p><strong>Stay connected to the people who work with you. It is that simple.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There is a phrase that was kicked around a lot a few years back in the software field. The phrase was about <em>going dark<\/em>. That phrase meant that a programmer would stop talking to everyone else. You didn&#8217;t know if the programmer was flying or sinking because the programmer wouldn&#8217;t tell anyone any thing.<\/p>\n<p>Most often, going dark meant that the programmer wasn&#8217;t accomplishing anything. Three weeks later, the rest of the programmers discovered that their project, and their paychecks, were lost. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.codinghorror.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/dont-go-dark.html\">Here is a post that discusses going dark among programmers<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Programming is not the only endeavor in which people go dark. It happens in every field where more than one person is involved in accomplishing work.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Stay connected to the people who work with you.<\/li>\n<li>Stay connected with every person who works with you.<\/li>\n<li>Yes, I mean that person, too. You know the one, the person you would happily not speak with often. Yes, that person.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>How many persons can you afford to waste? I mean, does every person have a large salary? Surely, you can waste the low-paid persons on your team. Right?<\/p>\n<p>No, you can&#8217;t. If a person is on your team, they are doing something worthwhile. You can&#8217;t afford to lose anything that is worthwhile.<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t go into stories about people who I allowed to go dark. I won&#8217;t tell stories about people who went dark on projects. The outcome was always the same and the outcome was bad.<\/p>\n<p>One rule of thumb:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Talk to every person every day<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ask them about the weather, and ask them about the work. Don&#8217;t accept answers like &#8220;fine and &#8220;okay.&#8221; Pry a bit; be respectful, but pry. Ask to see tangible results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips Stay connected to the people who work with you. It is that simple. There is a phrase that was kicked around a lot a few years back in the software field. The phrase was about going dark. That phrase meant that a programmer would stop talking to everyone else. You didn&#8217;t know [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,23],"tags":[154,133,145],"class_list":["post-1484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-people","category-programming","tag-communication","tag-people","tag-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1485,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1484\/revisions\/1485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}