What real experience gives you

A good friend of mine once told me something about work, something which I already believed in and I found it so nice to know that he shared the same opinion.

To quote him:

"I take up any task at work as if it was my first assignment. It makes me cautious and gets rid of any complacency. I get my confidence to grow as the work moves on"

I pretty much do the same. It helps me in a few things -

1. It gives me room to pay attention to detail

2. When I work with someone new, they immediately find it easy working with me.

3. Chances of failure would be minimal

This is what, I think, experience had really taught me.

Now, to explain why I am telling all this. It is because of this incident that happened at work all along last week. There was a key portion of our project which had both technical and functional challenges to tackle. The requirement was not clearly defined and the scope was too vague to say the least.

We had been discussing this over and over for the last 2 weeks, and had been merely recording our discussions and kept pushing it over to the next session as it was never really nearing completion.

This is the point when this person from another team was shifted to our project. Since all the other resources were tightly held up with tasks, we decided to assign this task to this new member of our team.

He was a confident person, but anyone could easily sense the air of pride around him. He asked a lot of questions, but nothing really related to the project. But that was totally fine, as long as the work gets done.

But what stumped all of us was the first discussion we had with him in which we tried to explain the task that we had just assigned to him. He never really seemed to listen to what we had to say and quickly jumped to provide the solution. He was clearly trying hard to impress, so we could forgive him for that. But it was his tone and attitude which was totally looking down upon us which pissed us off.

We decided to hang on with him for now on the hopes that he would settle down as he starts facing the wave from the top management. Sadly, that was all one could do even if you wanted to help him.

It happened exactly as we had expected - One tech discussion were he presented his approach and he was totally ripped apart. Now, he was ready for us to work with. He is not as unapproachable as he was before. I am glad that it all went fine.