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I don't like how you posit that expertise is some absolute thing. To some coworkers I'm a programming expert. To a 30-year veteran sysadmin I'm a novice. The

I don't like how you posit that expertise is some absolute thing. To some coworkers I'm a programming expert. To a 30-year veteran sysadmin I'm a novice. The same goes for any skill or knowledge - musicianship, cooking etc. Only one person in the world is the best at something, and it's not reasonable to compare yourself to that person when there's billions of us.

hardwaresofton 8y ago
I don't think I posited that though -- could you restate what you believed my thesis to be? I might just be a terrible writer and couldn't get my point across. > To some coworkers I'm a programming expert. To a 30-year veteran sysadmin I'm a novice. I agree with this -- but it was less about how others see you and how you see yourself. My point was that rather than claiming to be a programming expert, if you just get more specific about what you know, and keep good track of what you've learned/deep dove into at least once, and don't over-sell yourself, it is unlikely to feel like an impostor. Regardless of your actual level of expertise, if you've literally taken the time to follow an interrupt through the kernel, or read the SMTP spec, you have those pieces of knowledge (though they may be rusty). > The same goes for any skill or knowledge - musicianship, cooking etc. Only one person in the world is the best at something, and it's not reasonable to compare yourself to that person when there's billions of us. This is kind of a weird claim and seems to contradict the first thing you said. Most non-trivial skills can't be boiled down to one person just being the undisputed "best" -- for the world to work that way, expertise would have to be some absolute-ish thing. If I had to try and sum up your thesis: Expertise is very much about perspective. An amateur may look like a superhero to one group, but a novice to another group. If I had to sum up mine: Expertise is how much of a finite space of known things you currently know. The two theses seem orthogonal, I don't think we actually disagree.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  Where I think we disagree is that I would say impostor syndrome doesn't simply go away when you get better at something. This is because as you get better, you will encounter people better than you (especially if your career is advancing etc). To perfectionists or self-critical people this is hell. You basically say "don't say you're good at something unless you really are", but have no threshold for this. This quote from your article highlights this: > If you don’t want to be a fraud, or feel like one, do the hard work of learning(...) There's no upper bound on the level of knowledge required here. Am I "good" with Python because I can understand basic syntax and scoping rules? Do I need to know all of the standard library by heart? Python 2 and 3? Impostor syndrome isn't when you are a fraud, it's when you think you are but really aren't.
  - hardwaresofton 8y ago
    I don't think there's an upper bound on knowledge at all to begin with -- the pool of known facts for just about anything non-trivial is huge, and there's the known unknowns, and there's the unknown unknowns. If that's true, then it follows that it might be hard (if possible) to find an upper bound on the knowledge for python. There are so many ways you could use python (and related concepts and technology), a combinatoric explosion of complication and unique experience is guaranteed. To go with this, an intended (but maybe not properly conveyed) second point of the post was to stop saying "I'm an expert at X" and start saying "I'm familiar with X and have used it to do Y, and deal with Z -- spending a long time debugging problem A when it came up". The only way you can "know" a piece of code is by reading it, I would consider that table stakes, so for me "knowing" python means reading the interpreter code. But, I think it doesn't stop there because you could consider "expert"-level pythonistas to also include a working model of the system underlying to write super efficient python code. The point was that rather than claiming you're "good" with python, get more specific about what you know about it, and it should be relatively easy to note what you do and don't know, and cut down on the feeling that there's a world you don't know (which there almost always is). > Want to solve your impostor syndrome? Repeat after me (preferably in a tech interview): “While I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on A, I have read about A and done X, Y, and Z with it so I’m confident I can solve problems with it and debug it when things go wrong.” This line makes me cringe (and I wrote it), but the point I was trying to make is that we should stop boiling down language familiarity to terms like "good" and "expert", it's subjective, and depends on the application a lot of the time, just be able to recount the bits of knowledge you've gained with experience that you're sure about.

hardwaresofton 8y ago

I don't think I posited that though -- could you restate what you believed my thesis to be? I might just be a terrible writer and couldn't get my point across. > To some coworkers I'm a programming expert. To a 30-year veteran sysadmin I'm a novice. I agree with this -- but it was less about how others see you and how you see yourself. My point was that rather than claiming to be a programming expert, if you just get more specific about what you know, and keep good track of what you've learned/deep dove into at least once, and don't over-sell yourself, it is unlikely to feel like an impostor. Regardless of your actual level of expertise, if you've literally taken the time to follow an interrupt through the kernel, or read the SMTP spec, you have those pieces of knowledge (though they may be rusty). > The same goes for any skill or knowledge - musicianship, cooking etc. Only one person in the world is the best at something, and it's not reasonable to compare yourself to that person when there's billions of us. This is kind of a weird claim and seems to contradict the first thing you said. Most non-trivial skills can't be boiled down to one person just being the undisputed "best" -- for the world to work that way, expertise would have to be some absolute-ish thing. If I had to try and sum up your thesis: Expertise is very much about perspective. An amateur may look like a superhero to one group, but a novice to another group. If I had to sum up mine: Expertise is how much of a finite space of known things you currently know. The two theses seem orthogonal, I don't think we actually disagree.

fenwick67 8y ago
Where I think we disagree is that I would say impostor syndrome doesn't simply go away when you get better at something. This is because as you get better, you will encounter people better than you (especially if your career is advancing etc). To perfectionists or self-critical people this is hell. You basically say "don't say you're good at something unless you really are", but have no threshold for this. This quote from your article highlights this: > If you don’t want to be a fraud, or feel like one, do the hard work of learning(...) There's no upper bound on the level of knowledge required here. Am I "good" with Python because I can understand basic syntax and scoping rules? Do I need to know all of the standard library by heart? Python 2 and 3? Impostor syndrome isn't when you are a fraud, it's when you think you are but really aren't.
- hardwaresofton 8y ago
  I don't think there's an upper bound on knowledge at all to begin with -- the pool of known facts for just about anything non-trivial is huge, and there's the known unknowns, and there's the unknown unknowns. If that's true, then it follows that it might be hard (if possible) to find an upper bound on the knowledge for python. There are so many ways you could use python (and related concepts and technology), a combinatoric explosion of complication and unique experience is guaranteed. To go with this, an intended (but maybe not properly conveyed) second point of the post was to stop saying "I'm an expert at X" and start saying "I'm familiar with X and have used it to do Y, and deal with Z -- spending a long time debugging problem A when it came up". The only way you can "know" a piece of code is by reading it, I would consider that table stakes, so for me "knowing" python means reading the interpreter code. But, I think it doesn't stop there because you could consider "expert"-level pythonistas to also include a working model of the system underlying to write super efficient python code. The point was that rather than claiming you're "good" with python, get more specific about what you know about it, and it should be relatively easy to note what you do and don't know, and cut down on the feeling that there's a world you don't know (which there almost always is). > Want to solve your impostor syndrome? Repeat after me (preferably in a tech interview): “While I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on A, I have read about A and done X, Y, and Z with it so I’m confident I can solve problems with it and debug it when things go wrong.” This line makes me cringe (and I wrote it), but the point I was trying to make is that we should stop boiling down language familiarity to terms like "good" and "expert", it's subjective, and depends on the application a lot of the time, just be able to recount the bits of knowledge you've gained with experience that you're sure about.