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How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2013)

238 points by spdionis 11y ago

debacle 11y ago
There is a time-salary curve where it's socially acceptable to be a beginner. If your years of experience or salary are great enough, it takes a very honest, humble, and rare person to say "Look, I see and hear everything you're showing me. I clearly have no idea what I'm doing. Help." The most important part of the article is this: > ...and for whatever reason doesn’t have much interaction with peers? At some point you need to be shown what you don't know, and it's very rare for that to be a self-guided learning experience.
- Mvandenbergh 11y ago
  It's a u shaped curve though, sufficiently experienced people actually gain reputationally by admitting lack of expertise in a particular area. Only really works though if you're already respected for something else.
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    It's because they've stopped saying "I don't know" without following it up with "but I'll find out and get back to you tomorrow." And then actually doing it.
eranation 11y ago
If you work in an average company who hires average people and you are well above average you quickly risk becoming exactly that. You can be the top 5% (I know it's subjective and controversial yet I'm sure we all have a clue what that means) of developers and this will make it likely for you to be that "local maximum" as everyone will see you internally as a guru. But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won't even make the first round of phone screens. Get out of your comfort zone, and simply learn something new. Go wide, go deep or go both just realize that the moment you feel you are an expert on something it just means you are probably just ready to start learning it for real. tl;dr Knowing more than your peers doesn't make you an expert. You are at a local maximum and you need to look at the big picture to avoid being stuck there forever
- kdamken 11y ago
  This is very true and so important to your professional growth. There's a famous saying, "if you're the best one in the room, you're in the wrong room". At my last job I was the only developer at a small web agency, along with a designer and a project manager. Basically every problem and solution I had to figure out myself, and while I did that, due to time constraints I often had to go with just what worked, rather than figuring out the best of all possible options. At my current job, there are developers who know a lot more than me, and in the time I've spent working with them I've found I learn so much more so much more quickly than I did when I was working on my own.
  - alsetmusic 11y ago
    I went from a job where I was the resident expert to one where everyone had unbelievable and baffling skills. I learned far more in the latter.
    - defen 11y ago
      > unbelievable and baffling skills Any examples you can share?
      - anpk 11y ago
        Maybe he's still in the baffled stage
- allsystemsgo 11y ago
  Agreed. It creeps up on you too. Always be looking for the next great learning opportunity.
  - at-fates-hands 11y ago
    While I completely agree with this point - as a front-end developer its entirely maddening trying to keep pace and learn what the "next big thing" is going to be. For instance. . . . After leaving a very small local company I was working at, this is what I found after doing a few months of research and interviews: I had several interviews, every single one for a front-end role. They ran the gamut of JS frameworks. Do you know Backbone? AngularJS, Polymer, Typescript, ReactJS? A combination of some? or none at all? Not a single interviewer asked me about jQuery or my "vanilla" JS skills - NONE. Every company big and small was using some kind of framework, in some capacity - albeit in vastly different ways. The point here is there's no way for you to predict how your next great learning experience is actually going to help you down the road. Our landscape is changing virtually by the hour. I have now given up on trying to have a learning opportunity whereby I can add some really good skills to my resume not only for now - but for future opportunities. It's made me a bit jaded that our industry is so fragmented that even by learning a new library or framework, you effectively remove yourself from consideration from a host of companies because you didn't pick the "sexy" framework
jkot 11y ago
> They’ve officially become Expert Beginners, and they’re ready to entrench themselves into some niche in an organization and collect a huge paycheck because no one around them, including them, realizes that they can do a lot better. I think article is a bit naive. Nerds love learning for sake of it, but that is not usual. In what way the Expert Beginner could do better? Collect even bigger pay check? Or do less work for the same salary? Being N times better developer does not usually bring N times more rewards.
- sqeaky 11y ago
  I have seen this happen several times. Some, not all, programmers and IT professionals are nerds as you describe them. In most Professional positions I have held, maybe 1 in 50 people programmed outside of work and maybe 1 in 20 chose to learn beyond the minimum required to get by. Startups seem to have more of these types and big companies, fortune 500 sized seem to have almost none. As for how it betters oneself to learn, you cannot know until you learn it. The new tech exists because someone tried to solve the problems of the past, sometimes it works. You can't know the benefits of object oriented or functional programming if you are still writing the same cobol you did in the past or for a more modern analogy you will need to stand up more apache servers to get the same throughout if you have never learned about nginx.
  - tunichtgut 11y ago
    "In most Professional positions I have held, maybe 1 in 50 people programmed outside of work and maybe 1 in 20 chose to learn beyond the minimum required to get by." Double signed. Barely anyone is using his free time to learn more than needed at the workplace (which means the employees are stuck at the "minimum knowledge level"). And this is not just true for the IT branch.
  - mercer 11y ago
    I definitely find more 'just getting the job done' developers at companies that are bigger and/or have an IT department that is less crucial to the core business. It was shocking for me to find out how relatively bad many of these developers were; more than one didn't even use shortcut keys and were hunt-and-peck typists! One the one hand it made me feel a bit less stressed and a bit more confident about my own abilities. On the other hand it was a warning for me to keep trying to find the fun and challenge in my work, to treat it like a craft and not just a job, because every single one of these developers seemed to me to have relatively low job security, and I couldn't imagine many other companies hiring these people...
mcbrown 11y ago
This (partly) explains a major paradox I see: all the best software engineers I know are over 50, and yet the young'uns who dominate the tech zeitgeist assume these same people are incompetent dinosaurs. The young'uns have reached the expert beginner stage, and because they assume they're experts, they refuse to seek out the actual experts to discover what it is they don't know. And if the young'uns ARE the experts, and older developers aren't part of their in-group, then by definition the older developers must not be experts. This is why I (for one) am strongly biased towards hiring older developers.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  All the best software engineers I know are over 50, and yet the young'uns who dominate the tech zeitgeist assume these same people are incompetent dinosaurs. With age comes experience and also comes a strengthening of biases. Older people, so the stereotype goes, are inflexible and set in their ways, if very experienced in those ways. It's not really paradoxical, it just depends on what tradeoffs you're willing to make as the person responsible for hiring, which depends on your line of business. There are few things more tiresome than someone making mistakes you already made two decades ago and tried to warn about, and the same applies to someone ignoring the new and improved ways to get things done just because they've always done it that way and know it the best.
  - mcbrown 11y ago
    "With age comes experience and also comes a strengthening of biases. Older people, so the stereotype goes, are inflexible and set in their ways, if very experienced in those ways." Like most stereotypes, it might be true in some cases but far from universal. The literal two best developers I know, both over 50, are FAR from set in their ways. They are both constantly seeking new ways of doing things, exploring new languages and technologies, sometimes playing with low level projects (like making lights blink in interesting ways on breadboards), sometimes playing with high level projects (spawning hundreds or thousands of cloud instances to see how it works), but always looking for new things. They might SEEM set in their ways when they shoot down bad ideas from expert beginners, but that's only because the expert beginner is confusing wisdom for lack of flexibility.
golergka 11y ago
Can someone propose a test or at least some heuristic to check if you, yourself haven't fallen in that pit? Because this seems like something that would be very easy to diagnose in others, but almost impossible to see in yourself.
- organsnyder 11y ago
  The people I know that have fallen into this trap tend to have a lot of hubris and arrogance. They probably couldn't even fathom the notion that the label might be applicable. If you're even asking the question, I'd say there's a good chance that you're safe. More practically: As stated above, if you think you're the most competent person in the room, start looking for other rooms. You don't necessarily have to find new employment to do this—attending meetups and conferences, doing a side project with others, etc. can provide a barometer of where you stand among a wider community.
- tunichtgut 11y ago
  I propose to study technical literature. Study advanced books at a university library. If what is written inside is new to yourself AND you consider yourself an expert, you are in the expert-beginner pit.
  - golergka 11y ago
    Well, I do study technical literature — just today finished reading lecture slides for Stanford's CS143. The problem is, the technical literature that's interesting to me is dealing with much harder problems that I get to solve on day-by-day basis.
- SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
  You can't know everything there's far too much tech to keep up with; so everyone's expertise is some kind of local optimum. The question is just how local? i.e. How narrow is the pit that you're in? How filtered are the ideas that you receive? So looking a bit wider, e.g. "meetups and conferences" if you don't already attend, might help. Beyond that, look at people working in parallel programming languages - What is the main alternative to the languages that you use daily? And how do the people there do things? In what ways is it better?
dsmithatx 11y ago
Technology moves so fast that I'm not sure it even pays to become the actual expert anymore, most of the time. When I was younger I'd work 40 hours a week and spend at least 40 more becoming expert. It paid off and got me to the Senior level. However, all the technology I was an expert at 20, 15, and even less than 10 years ago is useless. When hiring I usually looked for guys that were smart and could quickly learn new things or jacks of all trades. Now if trying to write new kernel drivers maybe I'd get a Kernel/C expert who values himself at 120k/year (probably contract so I could use him for a month or two). But, lets face it most of the time companies want to hire the 3 smart enough guys at 80k/year than 2 geniuses at one specific language or technology. At least that has been my experience, then again, I usually work at normal smaller/midsize and non tech large companies. I'm sure if you work at Google your experience would be very different. The point is I don't care about being the expert anymore as it requires a lot of my unpaid personal time. Then after investing my time for free I find the tech trending down and have to go back to the drawing board again.
- dagw 11y ago
  Technology moves so fast that I'm not sure it even pays to become the actual expert anymore Don't master the 'surface' technology, master the underlying concepts. For example, rather than trying to master this week's cool machine learning library, master the underlying mathematics and you'll not only be far ahead of most people who only mastered the library, but you'll happily be able to transfer your skills to the next machine learning library with minimal effort for the rest of your career.
- maxxxxx 11y ago
  I think the big picture hasn't changed that much over the last 20 years. Obviously the scale has changed but the fundamental challenges are pretty much the same. The only thing that has changed is the language/framework on top but the basics are still the same. It always surprises me how little really changes.
- sklogic 11y ago
  > Technology moves so fast I've heard this many times before, but have not seen any evidence yet. Mind listing the technologies that got really, totally obsolete?
0xCMP 11y ago
Published 3 years ago?? I thought he was commenting on whats going on now... I think a great example of my issue with this is my father and I. He taught me the basics and got me to the Adv Beginner stage which allowed me to progress on my own. However, I chose web and he stayed with .NET for a long time. Only after a lot of pushing he started doing web like 5-6 years ago. I, an expert beginner at the time (and probably still), thought I was way better than my dad. How could this guy not be better than me already? No answers to my questions. etc. In hindsight, yea I was better but his experience meant he learned things I never did cause I never knew I need them. HE also knew things from his several decades of experience that let him think through problems or only accept a certain level of quality in his work that let him solve and deliver things much better than what I can/could. That said, we argued a lot about things. A father and son like us can have those debates, some times a little too heated, and be okay. But, if I was hiring I would be cautious (not opposed) about brining on people who would be too opposed to the way things are. The problem is that we (humans) avoid conflict and begin to play politics. If they don't avoid the conflict then we have open hostility. Either way, groups start forming a them/us mentality takes hold instead of the company working as a whole. Thats basically my general fear if I was in a position to hire. Thats what I feel "bad culture fit" would mean.
tunichtgut 11y ago
I like this article. I think im somewhere between the "competente" and "proficient" level learning and working with C++ and CUDA/C. As long as you dont consider yourself "an expert", you`re good. Experts are rly rare and otherwise you are most likely an expert-beginner stuck in the dead-end of the fork. Two things i may add: 1.) I think the only way out (beside getting help from others) of the expert-beginner dead-end is through gaining more knowledge, instead of gaining more experience. 2.) In applications, theres a massive, i call it "invasion" of "experts", just because everyone is claiming to be an "expert", not to be sorted out by HR. HR is most likely not a domain specialist in programming stuff. Now, given you state in your CV, you are "proficient", but an "expert-beginner" states "hes an expert", your kicked out of the interview stage. What a mess!
supergeek133 11y ago
I see this a lot in large enterprise environments. You have the "one person" or "few people" who implemented something 10 years ago and those architectural decisions are then re-implemented in any new project. Because that person has knowledge of legacy and carries it over to new, they are compensated and promoted accordingly. Meanwhile any new ideas or better designs are sometimes dismissed because they're outside the comfort zone of the development team that has a collective 50+ years experience in that company. Of course, many of us are resistant to new ideas regardless, but I see this pattern play out most often at large organizations.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  Which is part of why startups can be successful, right? If large cos took the same risks and did the same things as startups, startups would not exist.
  - supergeek133 11y ago
    Completely agree, startup success is as much quick thinking and process as it is new ideas.
GCA10 11y ago
The "expert beginner" concept almost gets it right, but it needs a little tweaking. The key insight is that growth stalls out when people lock into a sub-par set of habits ... and then spend years perfecting this not-so-good approach. I've seen the same thing happen with journalists (oh, my God, it is chronic and horrible there), and with chess players, musicians and all sorts of other specialists at various crafts and creative skills. These people trap themselves with habits that prevent them from ever being great, yet are just marketable enough that they can earn a living for a long time. The rot doesn't always set in exactly at the "advanced beginner" stage. It occurs whenever people's willingness to rebuild their game disappears, or whenever they fall under the sway of a mentor/boss who demands conformity to B-minus work practices.
girkyturkey 11y ago
At jobs like this article is referring to, we need to remember that you’re never going to improve in life if you keep competing with people who stink. No offense, those who are not well versed. You gotta challenge yourself. If you don’t, complacency sets in. And bad things happen when you become complacent.
SeanDav 11y ago
I have many years experience with all aspects of Excel, including VBA and I understood Excel better than anyone else I knew. At one stage I had the arrogance to think of myself as an expert in Excel. Fortunately, I changed companies to work at a hedge fund and realized, with some shock, that I was very far from an expert in Excel. Those guys were doing things with Excel that made my jaw drop. I had got complacent and thought I knew everything that was worth knowing. The funny thing was that this was not the first time this had happened to me. I underwent a very similar experience with C programming. I had read all the books, thought I understood everything there was to know about the language, then got exposed to some real C experts at a small high-tech company. That was a humbling experience as well. Needless to say, after getting humbled twice, I will be very careful before I ever call myself an expert at anything in the future!
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  I'd be interested to know what sort of things you saw the hedge fund employees use Excel for. I'm probably at that 'local maximum' point with Excel, and would be interested in knowing what areas I could look into to further my skills. The only 'growth area' I'm currently considering is Apps for Office.
  - daemin 11y ago
    So you may be interested in http://www.modeloff.com/ http://www.modeloff.com/ which is a competition for using Excel to create financial models. I was made aware of when listening to a Planet Money episode http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/episode-606-spreadsheets http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/episo... , which I would also recommend if you haven't listened to it already.
moomin 11y ago
Just a quick plug for the wonderful Expert Beginner Twitter account. https://twitter.com/ExpertBeginner1 https://twitter.com/ExpertBeginner1
lliamander 11y ago
I recommend reading the whole series of posts; I am only part way through, but it has been very enlightening.[0] Getting out of this trap is what motivated my first two job changes. I think there are a few things that are useful in staying on the narrow, difficult road to true expertise[1]: - Engagement with the wider technology community. You need to know where the global maxima are - An insistence on objective measurement and argument, rather than subjective assessment - A low tolerance for cognitive dissonance or sacrifices in quality to meet a deadline - A willingness to follow through and see the fruits of one's labor - As a corollary to the previous point, an insistence on shortening the feedback cycle as much as possible - Actively working to make it safe for others to criticize you and a willingness to say "I don't know" (in case you didn't know, criticizing others is genuinely very frightening for most people) - Greater graciousness towards subordinates, less towards superiors (the reverse of typical corporate culture) [0] http://www.daedtech.com/tag/expert-beginner/ http://www.daedtech.com/tag/expert-beginner/ [1] Not that I am an expert, just that I know I'm not an expert; and that I have met enough of both real experts and expert beginners to tell the difference.
- lliamander 11y ago
  Also, I have a hypothesis that Impostor Syndrome is the last defense of the rational mind against the descent into Expert Beginnerism. It certainly saved my bacon[0]. Listen to those doubts and seek out a mentor or a new job. [0] In the sense of "How in the hell did the success of this project end up resting in my hands?" or "Why am I making fundamental revisions of the architecture?"
ourmandave 11y ago
I'm worse at what I do best And for this gift I feel blessed Kurt Cobain
err4nt 11y ago
If you want to break out of the 'Expert Beginner' mindset, here are some helpful things that can challenge you to grow: - commit one new mistake every day - read about a theory, concept, model, or idea you didn't know before - look up the history of one tool, language, or software package you rely on and learn a little more about it - look up, and read at least one page in documentation for a tool you use Making a daily habit of some or all of these tasks will force you out of your plateau. There's no telling in which direction your learning will grow - but it's hard to stay stagnant in your skills when continually exposed to new ideas. So make a habit out of exposing yourself to, and generating new ideas!

238 points by spdionis 11y ago

There is a time-salary curve where it's socially acceptable to be a beginner. If your years of experience or salary are great enough, it takes a very honest, humble, and rare person to say "Look, I see and hear everything you're showing me. I clearly have no idea what I'm doing. Help." The most important part of the article is this: > ...and for whatever reason doesn’t have much interaction with peers? At some point you need to be shown what you don't know, and it's very rare for that to be a self-guided learning experience.

Mvandenbergh 11y ago
It's a u shaped curve though, sufficiently experienced people actually gain reputationally by admitting lack of expertise in a particular area. Only really works though if you're already respected for something else.
- jdmichal 11y ago
  It's because they've stopped saying "I don't know" without following it up with "but I'll find out and get back to you tomorrow." And then actually doing it.

eranation 11y ago

If you work in an average company who hires average people and you are well above average you quickly risk becoming exactly that. You can be the top 5% (I know it's subjective and controversial yet I'm sure we all have a clue what that means) of developers and this will make it likely for you to be that "local maximum" as everyone will see you internally as a guru. But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won't even make the first round of phone screens. Get out of your comfort zone, and simply learn something new. Go wide, go deep or go both just realize that the moment you feel you are an expert on something it just means you are probably just ready to start learning it for real. tl;dr Knowing more than your peers doesn't make you an expert. You are at a local maximum and you need to look at the big picture to avoid being stuck there forever

kdamken 11y ago
This is very true and so important to your professional growth. There's a famous saying, "if you're the best one in the room, you're in the wrong room". At my last job I was the only developer at a small web agency, along with a designer and a project manager. Basically every problem and solution I had to figure out myself, and while I did that, due to time constraints I often had to go with just what worked, rather than figuring out the best of all possible options. At my current job, there are developers who know a lot more than me, and in the time I've spent working with them I've found I learn so much more so much more quickly than I did when I was working on my own.
- alsetmusic 11y ago
  I went from a job where I was the resident expert to one where everyone had unbelievable and baffling skills. I learned far more in the latter.
  - defen 11y ago
    > unbelievable and baffling skills Any examples you can share?
    - anpk 11y ago
      Maybe he's still in the baffled stage
allsystemsgo 11y ago
Agreed. It creeps up on you too. Always be looking for the next great learning opportunity.
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  While I completely agree with this point - as a front-end developer its entirely maddening trying to keep pace and learn what the "next big thing" is going to be. For instance. . . . After leaving a very small local company I was working at, this is what I found after doing a few months of research and interviews: I had several interviews, every single one for a front-end role. They ran the gamut of JS frameworks. Do you know Backbone? AngularJS, Polymer, Typescript, ReactJS? A combination of some? or none at all? Not a single interviewer asked me about jQuery or my "vanilla" JS skills - NONE. Every company big and small was using some kind of framework, in some capacity - albeit in vastly different ways. The point here is there's no way for you to predict how your next great learning experience is actually going to help you down the road. Our landscape is changing virtually by the hour. I have now given up on trying to have a learning opportunity whereby I can add some really good skills to my resume not only for now - but for future opportunities. It's made me a bit jaded that our industry is so fragmented that even by learning a new library or framework, you effectively remove yourself from consideration from a host of companies because you didn't pick the "sexy" framework

jkot 11y ago

> They’ve officially become Expert Beginners, and they’re ready to entrench themselves into some niche in an organization and collect a huge paycheck because no one around them, including them, realizes that they can do a lot better. I think article is a bit naive. Nerds love learning for sake of it, but that is not usual. In what way the Expert Beginner could do better? Collect even bigger pay check? Or do less work for the same salary? Being N times better developer does not usually bring N times more rewards.

sqeaky 11y ago
I have seen this happen several times. Some, not all, programmers and IT professionals are nerds as you describe them. In most Professional positions I have held, maybe 1 in 50 people programmed outside of work and maybe 1 in 20 chose to learn beyond the minimum required to get by. Startups seem to have more of these types and big companies, fortune 500 sized seem to have almost none. As for how it betters oneself to learn, you cannot know until you learn it. The new tech exists because someone tried to solve the problems of the past, sometimes it works. You can't know the benefits of object oriented or functional programming if you are still writing the same cobol you did in the past or for a more modern analogy you will need to stand up more apache servers to get the same throughout if you have never learned about nginx.
- tunichtgut 11y ago
  "In most Professional positions I have held, maybe 1 in 50 people programmed outside of work and maybe 1 in 20 chose to learn beyond the minimum required to get by." Double signed. Barely anyone is using his free time to learn more than needed at the workplace (which means the employees are stuck at the "minimum knowledge level"). And this is not just true for the IT branch.
- mercer 11y ago
  I definitely find more 'just getting the job done' developers at companies that are bigger and/or have an IT department that is less crucial to the core business. It was shocking for me to find out how relatively bad many of these developers were; more than one didn't even use shortcut keys and were hunt-and-peck typists! One the one hand it made me feel a bit less stressed and a bit more confident about my own abilities. On the other hand it was a warning for me to keep trying to find the fun and challenge in my work, to treat it like a craft and not just a job, because every single one of these developers seemed to me to have relatively low job security, and I couldn't imagine many other companies hiring these people...

mcbrown 11y ago

This (partly) explains a major paradox I see: all the best software engineers I know are over 50, and yet the young'uns who dominate the tech zeitgeist assume these same people are incompetent dinosaurs. The young'uns have reached the expert beginner stage, and because they assume they're experts, they refuse to seek out the actual experts to discover what it is they don't know. And if the young'uns ARE the experts, and older developers aren't part of their in-group, then by definition the older developers must not be experts. This is why I (for one) am strongly biased towards hiring older developers.

Karunamon 11y ago
All the best software engineers I know are over 50, and yet the young'uns who dominate the tech zeitgeist assume these same people are incompetent dinosaurs. With age comes experience and also comes a strengthening of biases. Older people, so the stereotype goes, are inflexible and set in their ways, if very experienced in those ways. It's not really paradoxical, it just depends on what tradeoffs you're willing to make as the person responsible for hiring, which depends on your line of business. There are few things more tiresome than someone making mistakes you already made two decades ago and tried to warn about, and the same applies to someone ignoring the new and improved ways to get things done just because they've always done it that way and know it the best.
- mcbrown 11y ago
  "With age comes experience and also comes a strengthening of biases. Older people, so the stereotype goes, are inflexible and set in their ways, if very experienced in those ways." Like most stereotypes, it might be true in some cases but far from universal. The literal two best developers I know, both over 50, are FAR from set in their ways. They are both constantly seeking new ways of doing things, exploring new languages and technologies, sometimes playing with low level projects (like making lights blink in interesting ways on breadboards), sometimes playing with high level projects (spawning hundreds or thousands of cloud instances to see how it works), but always looking for new things. They might SEEM set in their ways when they shoot down bad ideas from expert beginners, but that's only because the expert beginner is confusing wisdom for lack of flexibility.

golergka 11y ago

Can someone propose a test or at least some heuristic to check if you, yourself haven't fallen in that pit? Because this seems like something that would be very easy to diagnose in others, but almost impossible to see in yourself.

organsnyder 11y ago
The people I know that have fallen into this trap tend to have a lot of hubris and arrogance. They probably couldn't even fathom the notion that the label might be applicable. If you're even asking the question, I'd say there's a good chance that you're safe. More practically: As stated above, if you think you're the most competent person in the room, start looking for other rooms. You don't necessarily have to find new employment to do this—attending meetups and conferences, doing a side project with others, etc. can provide a barometer of where you stand among a wider community.
tunichtgut 11y ago
I propose to study technical literature. Study advanced books at a university library. If what is written inside is new to yourself AND you consider yourself an expert, you are in the expert-beginner pit.
- golergka 11y ago
  Well, I do study technical literature — just today finished reading lecture slides for Stanford's CS143. The problem is, the technical literature that's interesting to me is dealing with much harder problems that I get to solve on day-by-day basis.
SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
You can't know everything there's far too much tech to keep up with; so everyone's expertise is some kind of local optimum. The question is just how local? i.e. How narrow is the pit that you're in? How filtered are the ideas that you receive? So looking a bit wider, e.g. "meetups and conferences" if you don't already attend, might help. Beyond that, look at people working in parallel programming languages - What is the main alternative to the languages that you use daily? And how do the people there do things? In what ways is it better?

dsmithatx 11y ago

Technology moves so fast that I'm not sure it even pays to become the actual expert anymore, most of the time. When I was younger I'd work 40 hours a week and spend at least 40 more becoming expert. It paid off and got me to the Senior level. However, all the technology I was an expert at 20, 15, and even less than 10 years ago is useless. When hiring I usually looked for guys that were smart and could quickly learn new things or jacks of all trades. Now if trying to write new kernel drivers maybe I'd get a Kernel/C expert who values himself at 120k/year (probably contract so I could use him for a month or two). But, lets face it most of the time companies want to hire the 3 smart enough guys at 80k/year than 2 geniuses at one specific language or technology. At least that has been my experience, then again, I usually work at normal smaller/midsize and non tech large companies. I'm sure if you work at Google your experience would be very different. The point is I don't care about being the expert anymore as it requires a lot of my unpaid personal time. Then after investing my time for free I find the tech trending down and have to go back to the drawing board again.

dagw 11y ago
Technology moves so fast that I'm not sure it even pays to become the actual expert anymore Don't master the 'surface' technology, master the underlying concepts. For example, rather than trying to master this week's cool machine learning library, master the underlying mathematics and you'll not only be far ahead of most people who only mastered the library, but you'll happily be able to transfer your skills to the next machine learning library with minimal effort for the rest of your career.
maxxxxx 11y ago
I think the big picture hasn't changed that much over the last 20 years. Obviously the scale has changed but the fundamental challenges are pretty much the same. The only thing that has changed is the language/framework on top but the basics are still the same. It always surprises me how little really changes.
sklogic 11y ago
> Technology moves so fast I've heard this many times before, but have not seen any evidence yet. Mind listing the technologies that got really, totally obsolete?

0xCMP 11y ago

Published 3 years ago?? I thought he was commenting on whats going on now... I think a great example of my issue with this is my father and I. He taught me the basics and got me to the Adv Beginner stage which allowed me to progress on my own. However, I chose web and he stayed with .NET for a long time. Only after a lot of pushing he started doing web like 5-6 years ago. I, an expert beginner at the time (and probably still), thought I was way better than my dad. How could this guy not be better than me already? No answers to my questions. etc. In hindsight, yea I was better but his experience meant he learned things I never did cause I never knew I need them. HE also knew things from his several decades of experience that let him think through problems or only accept a certain level of quality in his work that let him solve and deliver things much better than what I can/could. That said, we argued a lot about things. A father and son like us can have those debates, some times a little too heated, and be okay. But, if I was hiring I would be cautious (not opposed) about brining on people who would be too opposed to the way things are. The problem is that we (humans) avoid conflict and begin to play politics. If they don't avoid the conflict then we have open hostility. Either way, groups start forming a them/us mentality takes hold instead of the company working as a whole. Thats basically my general fear if I was in a position to hire. Thats what I feel "bad culture fit" would mean.

tunichtgut 11y ago

I like this article. I think im somewhere between the "competente" and "proficient" level learning and working with C++ and CUDA/C. As long as you dont consider yourself "an expert", you`re good. Experts are rly rare and otherwise you are most likely an expert-beginner stuck in the dead-end of the fork. Two things i may add: 1.) I think the only way out (beside getting help from others) of the expert-beginner dead-end is through gaining more knowledge, instead of gaining more experience. 2.) In applications, theres a massive, i call it "invasion" of "experts", just because everyone is claiming to be an "expert", not to be sorted out by HR. HR is most likely not a domain specialist in programming stuff. Now, given you state in your CV, you are "proficient", but an "expert-beginner" states "hes an expert", your kicked out of the interview stage. What a mess!

supergeek133 11y ago

I see this a lot in large enterprise environments. You have the "one person" or "few people" who implemented something 10 years ago and those architectural decisions are then re-implemented in any new project. Because that person has knowledge of legacy and carries it over to new, they are compensated and promoted accordingly. Meanwhile any new ideas or better designs are sometimes dismissed because they're outside the comfort zone of the development team that has a collective 50+ years experience in that company. Of course, many of us are resistant to new ideas regardless, but I see this pattern play out most often at large organizations.

brianwawok 11y ago
Which is part of why startups can be successful, right? If large cos took the same risks and did the same things as startups, startups would not exist.
- supergeek133 11y ago
  Completely agree, startup success is as much quick thinking and process as it is new ideas.

GCA10 11y ago

The "expert beginner" concept almost gets it right, but it needs a little tweaking. The key insight is that growth stalls out when people lock into a sub-par set of habits ... and then spend years perfecting this not-so-good approach. I've seen the same thing happen with journalists (oh, my God, it is chronic and horrible there), and with chess players, musicians and all sorts of other specialists at various crafts and creative skills. These people trap themselves with habits that prevent them from ever being great, yet are just marketable enough that they can earn a living for a long time. The rot doesn't always set in exactly at the "advanced beginner" stage. It occurs whenever people's willingness to rebuild their game disappears, or whenever they fall under the sway of a mentor/boss who demands conformity to B-minus work practices.

girkyturkey 11y ago

At jobs like this article is referring to, we need to remember that you’re never going to improve in life if you keep competing with people who stink. No offense, those who are not well versed. You gotta challenge yourself. If you don’t, complacency sets in. And bad things happen when you become complacent.

SeanDav 11y ago

I have many years experience with all aspects of Excel, including VBA and I understood Excel better than anyone else I knew. At one stage I had the arrogance to think of myself as an expert in Excel. Fortunately, I changed companies to work at a hedge fund and realized, with some shock, that I was very far from an expert in Excel. Those guys were doing things with Excel that made my jaw drop. I had got complacent and thought I knew everything that was worth knowing. The funny thing was that this was not the first time this had happened to me. I underwent a very similar experience with C programming. I had read all the books, thought I understood everything there was to know about the language, then got exposed to some real C experts at a small high-tech company. That was a humbling experience as well. Needless to say, after getting humbled twice, I will be very careful before I ever call myself an expert at anything in the future!

ZenoArrow 11y ago
I'd be interested to know what sort of things you saw the hedge fund employees use Excel for. I'm probably at that 'local maximum' point with Excel, and would be interested in knowing what areas I could look into to further my skills. The only 'growth area' I'm currently considering is Apps for Office.
- daemin 11y ago
  So you may be interested in http://www.modeloff.com/ http://www.modeloff.com/ which is a competition for using Excel to create financial models. I was made aware of when listening to a Planet Money episode http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/episode-606-spreadsheets http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/episo... , which I would also recommend if you haven't listened to it already.

moomin 11y ago

Just a quick plug for the wonderful Expert Beginner Twitter account. https://twitter.com/ExpertBeginner1 https://twitter.com/ExpertBeginner1

lliamander 11y ago

I recommend reading the whole series of posts; I am only part way through, but it has been very enlightening.[0] Getting out of this trap is what motivated my first two job changes. I think there are a few things that are useful in staying on the narrow, difficult road to true expertise[1]: - Engagement with the wider technology community. You need to know where the global maxima are - An insistence on objective measurement and argument, rather than subjective assessment - A low tolerance for cognitive dissonance or sacrifices in quality to meet a deadline - A willingness to follow through and see the fruits of one's labor - As a corollary to the previous point, an insistence on shortening the feedback cycle as much as possible - Actively working to make it safe for others to criticize you and a willingness to say "I don't know" (in case you didn't know, criticizing others is genuinely very frightening for most people) - Greater graciousness towards subordinates, less towards superiors (the reverse of typical corporate culture) [0] http://www.daedtech.com/tag/expert-beginner/ http://www.daedtech.com/tag/expert-beginner/ [1] Not that I am an expert, just that I know I'm not an expert; and that I have met enough of both real experts and expert beginners to tell the difference.

lliamander 11y ago
Also, I have a hypothesis that Impostor Syndrome is the last defense of the rational mind against the descent into Expert Beginnerism. It certainly saved my bacon[0]. Listen to those doubts and seek out a mentor or a new job. [0] In the sense of "How in the hell did the success of this project end up resting in my hands?" or "Why am I making fundamental revisions of the architecture?"

ourmandave 11y ago

I'm worse at what I do best And for this gift I feel blessed Kurt Cobain

err4nt 11y ago

If you want to break out of the 'Expert Beginner' mindset, here are some helpful things that can challenge you to grow: - commit one new mistake every day - read about a theory, concept, model, or idea you didn't know before - look up the history of one tool, language, or software package you rely on and learn a little more about it - look up, and read at least one page in documentation for a tool you use Making a daily habit of some or all of these tasks will force you out of your plateau. There's no telling in which direction your learning will grow - but it's hard to stay stagnant in your skills when continually exposed to new ideas. So make a habit out of exposing yourself to, and generating new ideas!