My company sent my team on a business trip to another office in Europe to learn the ins and outs of a legacy software application that we will be adapting and developing for one of our customers. The application is very complex and runs on multiple hardware components, servers, databases, etc. and the source code contains millions of lines. There is documentation but it is pieced together and disconnected and not organized in an accessible way. It is a daunting undertaking to learn the application and there are many developers that have spent years building this product up to what it is today. It is a lot to learn in a short time and we were sent to work with the experts. We realized very quickly that not all great engineers know how to communicate well or make for being great teachers. While this was an amazing opportunity to travel and work, it was incredibly challenging to make the most of the opportunity to learn as much as possible. We had to figure out how to capture and retain the most amount of knowledge that we could since that was why we were there in the first place.
One of the difficult learning experiences we had to figure out was working with an engineer who is incredibly brilliant but went through stuff lightning fast. He expected us to know everything and perfectly retain it as he went. He had no patience for taking notes or waiting for someone to catch up even though we were working through things that we’ve never seen before. After the first session, I didn’t retain hardly any of what we were shown and we had to construct documentation together as a whole group to make sure we had it all and could replicate what was presented. We realized that we needed to record the next session so that we could capture and review all of this excellent content. So the next day we all made screen recordings as we went and now we have archives of the presentations to take back to our office and reference in our future work.
Another difficult learning situation was attending presentations that were super long and drawn out. Some of them went longer than two hours without breaks and didn’t have any summary points or review. It became super exhausting and uncomfortable to focus for so long but it wasn’t culturally acceptable to interrupt and ask to take a break. Some of us tried to record these sessions but either the laptop batteries died or the recording files were ridiculously large and couldn’t be stored. Once we understood the situation, we decided to each write down one main point or question for each slide in the presentation and at the end we requested a copy of the slide presentation and used our notes to try to ask meaningful questions to show that we were engaged and retained some of the knowledge.
I think in our normal day to day work lives we can tend to get lax and easily distracted or discontent and become less productive. This opportunity to travel to a place where people have different cultural behaviors and values challenged me to see a different perspective and have to figure out how to overcome difficulties in learning and communicating. While I don’t have perfect focus and attention, I was able to leverage technology to help me make the most of the limited and unique opportunity to gain knowledge and skills from this experience and I would encourage everyone to use the tools you have to help you get the most out of an opportunity to learn something new.
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