Not Becoming a SILO

As much as all of us try, some of us can become a SILO.  I feel that I've done my best not to let this happen, but it inevitably happened.

So I got my shot in the tech industry when I was less than 6 months in college for Computer Science.  My wife, who works in IT,  was at a happy hour with co-workers and I called to see what she was up to.  I was invited to the party only to find myself talking to her boss (the CTO) most of the evening about what I was studying and an article I read about not using silicon in processors anymore.  This was a Friday evening.  On Monday evening I got an email from her boss asking if I'd like to work on a part time project he needed help with.  Of course I said yes and I was dieing to get into the industry.

 The side project was Salesforce Development for their instance.  If any of you have developed in Apex, it's a huge pain, but nothing good comes easy am I right?  I was extremely thankful and regardless of how bad it sucked, I still pressed on.  Over a few months I feel that I built a handful of decent products.  I had a full time job working for Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals and did the coding on the side.  After awhile I told my wife that I was going to quit my job and focus 100% of my time on working in IT.  The job doing Salesforce was very clear that it was only a single project, I started speaking with recruiters at Meetups in my area.  I had a number of leads, and was hot on the track of getting a full time job doing what I enjoyed so much.  But within 2 weeks of me quiting Mallinckrodt, I was offered a full time job where I was working the small project.

After a number of months doing Salesforce Development, I moved onto the SQL Database team, working on SSIS that fed into our Salesforce Org.  My new boss asked a number of times if I wanted to become a DBA, and after I continually told him that I wanted to be a Developer, he arrange it so I was on the .NET side of our company as a Developer.  Now I know I am a Salesforce Developer, but I feel I picked up C# pretty fast.  I currently still do Salesforce, but everytime a ticket comes up, I tend to not share what I know about the proprietary language Apex.  I'm honestly not trying to keep myself as the sole keeper of knowledge of that platform, but I want to shield others from the pain of developing in that language.

Recently I've had to work a ticket to add functionality to my current code, and got a developer up to speed, but it got blocked and I switched my pair.  I by no means felt that he wasn't capable of understanding the code I wrote, but I felt that it would be faster if I just "did it myself".  At our Retrospective, I realized I wasn't being fair to my team by not spreading the knowledge, regardless of how painful it was.  So needless to say I'm going to make a better effort to spread what I know about the codebase I built and making it so I can have someone to share the pain with.

-Kwiknick