I think what you said both here and in your post are very valuable additions indeed. To me what it feels like you're saying is - when you are truly an "expert"

I think what you said both here and in your post are very valuable additions indeed. To me what it feels like you're saying is - when you are truly an "expert", it is more likely that you can identify/recognize other "experts" - or even people with that potential. When I look at my own skills, I try to rate myself honestly on the following scale with regards to some particular skill: expert, professional or amateur. Expert is a guru-level understanding. If I say that I am an expert, I am saying I think I am as good as the top x% (where x is maybe 1-10) in a particular skill. For me, I pretty much never rate myself as this in any skill! Professional is practiced, practical, hands-on real world skill. You've honed this skill, you've been formally trained, you've employed this skill successfully in a repeated, demonstrated way. Amateur is a hobby, done it a few times, do it for fun or would like to do it/get better at it level of experience. I observed that in traditional skilled tradesmanship, we have the apprentice, who progresses to the journeyman, who progresses to the master craftsman. These are the same levels of what I mean by amateur, professional and expert. I don't know why our industry seems to reject some of these concepts from skilled trades in terms of organizing into better/stronger professional trade organizations and certifications. Actually, the way we often talk about coding as a "craft", it's almost like we would feel a lot better with a formal organization and such a career progression/structure in place. We have our 1%'ers in the software community, our gurus/experts/master craftsman. I often think of these as the core contributing past and current "fathers" and "mothers" of our industry, people ranging anywhere from Ada Lovelace to Vint Cerf. Reality is, those core thinkers are probably where many of us learn from anyway - that and "hacking/tinkering" which is what many of us do and can still lead to progress too. To me it's all connected, but something about our community always holds us back... maybe there it is the element of not wanting to be forced into structure either. After all, the "hacker" ethos is also a source of our strength, and part of the art.