This issue rather than being technical is administrative and moral, but the pleasure of having an audience as select as you sele moved me the courage to write about it.
Some time ago I had a cadastre technician who was very good (sincerely very good), older by the way therefore a bit outdated technologically but with great experience both in the implementation of field survey processes and ability to start a productive system at the level of a municipality in the cadastre department.
The problem with this technician was that what he did not implement was not good, that is, he was a declared critic regarding the work of others ... which by the way is very easy if you want to be a specialist in this. I constantly had the rest of the technicians complaining that whenever he could this technician criticized their work, in a way that becomes so annoying for to piss To anybody.
- This work was a failure.- It was one of the phrases that we frequently hear, and of course who was responsible for the criticized work ended up very annoyed after knowing the comment ... in other cases the comments were not to that extreme but comparisons were seen that ended up being just as annoying. And in many cases he dared to criticize a mapping specialist or a web services development specialist without being his specialty.
To what extent a consistent practice of criticism can be constructive?
The annoying thing about this is that only those who do things know how difficult the circumstances were by which what was technically defined in a quality plan, did not reach that level ... be it for reasons of resources, personnel, attitudes and even of idiotic practices of the politicians of our Spanish-speaking developing countries. In some cases, criticizing others can be a level of self-pride confused with a self-esteem problem, so that in order to feel good, it is necessary to criticize what others do and compare it with what we would have done ourselves.
Let's reach an agreement, criticism can be good as long as it does not become a harmful practice and especially as long as the level of specialty is respected. Definitely I will be able to gain a lot of experience but I will never catch up with this technician because as long as I walk the path, he will also travel it so I will never be able to catch up with him but there is a field in which I will be a specialist in which he will not catch up easily. So, repeating the level of specialty, James Fee will be a specialist in understanding web services, but I can modestly feel like a specialist in CAD technologies not because I understand them better than James Fee, but because I taught AutoCAD and Microstation courses so many times I have made so many plans that I learned many tricks to feel like a specialist ... unless I get out of date and think I don't need to see that brings back AutoCAD 2009.
As the geomatics So wide, there are so many fields of specialty between Cartography, Topography, Photogrammetry, Geodesy, Geography, let alone the levels of implementation linked to information technologies. Be it at the level of capture, processing, analysis, display or even poetic smoking, no one can feel like a specialist in everything.
In this life we must respect the level of specialty, with exceptions like Leonardo Da Vinci, we will all be good at something and not so specialized in other subjects. What is valuable is being able to be complementary and knowing when to recognize the achievements of others. I started blogging not long ago, at least in geomatics, so I will never have the route that Tomás has with Cartesia that started with web 1.0, nor that of the guys from Geomatic blog who have great charisma in Western Europe. But I will be able to maintain a level of specialty that will make me particular and complementary to the work they do.
Recognizing the skills that others have should make us grow ... and if the technician who led me to write this post one day takes an internet course ... maybe find his mirror, and J * der! I hope it has already changed because it must be sad to get older and not be able to change attitudes of a lifetime.