“People who think they know it all are especially annoying to those of us who do.”
Anonymous.
As you build up your knowledge about your particular OSS you will become increasingly important to your team. But over the years I’ve also learnt that it is more important to promote autonomy in your team-mates rather than being the centre of all knowledge by taking the time to teach rather than preach.
In a couple of my earliest OctopOSS projects I was responsible for data modelling and data creation / migration. It was a role that I loved because it was the centre of all knowledge capture. However, I was also the bottleneck for the project because all other teams relied on the data in the database. Trainers, testers, business analysts, etc all needed quality data to be able to do their thing. And I was delaying everyone’s thing despite 80-plus hour weeks for months on end.
In retrospect, this was a failure of my ability to look beyond the defined responsibilities of others’ roles, call out for help from other team members and to then train them to take up some of the workload.
Where on the spectrum do you fall? Centre of all knowledge or master delegator?
PS. I’m the first to acknowledge that I don’t know it all as referenced to the quote above.