Interview Notes – Are you a team player?

Assuming some form of this question will never die evokes a significant response from my background threads…

• fundamental work perspective (FWP) #1  - it’s easy to knee jerk a “yes, of course i am!” with the idea that you think you can get along with just about anybody… but a flip side of the coin is to consider those non contributors that take advantage of the true contributors in a team… “the leech” would be at the malicious end of the spectrum but in general it’s pretty challenging to assemble a group of people with skills sets matching well enough that they can all just be thrown in a box and expect them to be a productive team… if that’s the best management you are capable of, then you should probably focus on highly productive individuals first and plan on learning the next level if you’re lucky… anyone that’s asking me “am i a team player” is begging all sorts of questions about how good they are at forming teams… have they ever led a team to multiple reproducible successes… and now define that success… how was it measured?
• FWP #1.1 – i do however get that positive responses to one’s own “teamwork capacity” is the kind of ammunition one needs in these moments rather than “dodging” an interviewers questions with more questions… so something i truly believe down deep goes something like this… the things that each one of us “know” or understand should absolutely not be held as guarded secrets to protect & justify one’s own existence… I’ll admit, this may be the attitude of someone that has been extremely “lucky” with one solid job after the next ever since i left college and that is now a 16 year run… part of that luck i think is that software development is just such a critical need under any rock you turn over… the world i see needs way more developers than it has on hand… there are just SOOOO many problems that need solving… and that leads me to my point… the knowledge we each have should be absolutely “given away” to our fellow employees in the trenches with us as fast as one can possibly accomplish the knowledge transfer by whatever means available… (over beers after work is one of my personal favorite knowledge transfer opportunities! :)  AND THEN once we all know what we know, we can finally move on the to “good stuff”, right??  i mean the stuff i know, by definition, must’ve been fairly easy to comprehend… so lets all get to that level and then help boost each other up to the next level and the next and the next and maybe after a while we’ll really be “somewhere”… so in a nutshell, i do not believe in “hoarding knowledge”… i flippin hate people that practice this behavior… i pity them for their small mindedness… i initially assume they learned it from some other hoarder and try to sit down with them in a non charged moment and see if there’s any hope of seeing things differently… i wanna whack the managers that allow this to happen with the bozo bowling pin and tell them to WAKE UP…  you’re wasting your own valuable resources, in these lean times!?!  that is not good for the shareholders dude/dudette…
• i ‘spose i’m just puking out the obvious at this point but this is the core reason for formal education… to get us up to some baseline knowledge set so that a human’s life isn’t wasted solving the same stupid things generations did prior… so we can EVOLVE… please please please GOD, we NEED to evolve… we are still such children running around doing such mindless things… don’t get me wrong, life is generally good, but MAN do we “waste” it on trivial pursuits… myself doggedly included