User Guide?? User Guide!

I recently came across a practice in tech that I was previously unfamiliar with, and which I think is kinda neat.

Having recently started a new $work at GEICO Tech, it was brought to my attention that a couple of my new colleagues had posted company-internal User Guides for… themselves. As in: here are instructions for interacting with, and getting the most out of, this entity that is me.

It’s an opportunity to outline some of your philosophies & best practices, as well as enumerate some of your quirks, etc., so people are not caught off guard by them.

Now before I go any further, let me say that this is NOT meant as a way to list one’s own bad behaviors and thus excuse oneself from blame for them. Instead, the idea is to create a one-stop shop for stuff that people who work with you will ultimately need to find out about you, and state those things up front rather than having people have to discover them the slow (and sometimes painful) way.

So I hopped on the bandwagon (remember, I returned to tech after a long hiatus, so I may be years or even decades late to this particular bandwagon, but whatever) and created my own.

Here’s a light paraphrase of the one I posted internally for my team. Keep in mind, this is tailored to tech folks that are my coworkers as we work together on tech things. These user guides are not intended to cover the totality of one’s being (lol). Oh, also: the user guide contains more or less the entire content of the brief bio page from this here site as a proper subpart; sorry for the repetition, but that is done intentionally.