Information Hiding for Fun and Profit

Another great use for making data private:

Increasing the scope of the object that contains the data.

If you artificially restrict access to information that you hold, then you artificially become more important.  You promote yourself as the go-to person for that information.

If you made the information widely available (public) then you would remove yourself from the loop.

And if you're trying to climb a corporate ladder where promotions are based on the size of your sphere of influence, then you'd do yourself a disservice by giving away information you hold.

Instead, force people to make appointments in your already busy schedule.  Then, not only do they have to go through you to get the information you want, you get the side benefit that people get first-hand exposure to how dense your schedule is.  If you're inaccessible, you must be important.

This strategy is like an onion of win.

If you thought the benefits of data-hiding ended at being able to change the implementation of processes that operate on that data, add this gem to your list.

In a future post I might reveal how to access somebody else's data (private or not!) and present it as your own.  In OOP we call that a facade.  In the industry we call it bi-winning.

See you at the top!




[I don't really feel this way about my colleagues or where I work; I just felt a snarky streak and found this entertaining to write. Consider this a work of fiction. But! Read what this Vanity Fair article states about stack ranking.]