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This is projection by people who are untrained in what they do. Competent people with good training in some discipline are able to apply that training to compe

This is projection by people who are untrained in what they do. Competent people with good training in some discipline are able to apply that training to competently achieve goals. This allows them to apply knowledge that they didn't develop themselves by trial and error, and is much more efficient, with better outcomes than the alternatives. Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Although "seems" is the operative word: if it weren't for this effect, we'd see many more bridges and buildings collapsing, ships sinking, etc. It's just that many areas of human endeavour tend to more commonly involve untrained people "winging it", and that's what the article focuses on.

jamesrcole 8y ago
> Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. ... many areas of human endeavour tend to more commonly involve untrained people This seems to imply "if only everyone got adequate training". It's not like that, though. There's a lot of important, worthwhile endeavours that inherently involve having to figure things out as you go.
B0btheBuilder 8y ago
Even competent people with good training aren't perfect. Competent people make mistakes. You mention bridges, buildings, and ships, all projects built by massive teams of people and stringent processes. These massive teams of people and stringent processes are necessary exactly because people aren't perfect. I'm unclear what you mean by the article focusing on "untrained people", unless you're trying to claim that politicians and newspaper executives are untrained.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  Making occasional mistakes while applying formal knowledge seems to be qualitatively quite different from making suboptimal decisions because you’re improvising due to lack of such formal knowledge. In some domains you don’t have a choice; there are too many moving parts, decision making is of necessity based on noisy and incomplete information, the domain is too messy for formal models to be useful. You just have to intuit and improvise. This is more often than not the case when human interactions are involved. Trying to impose engineering solutions to social problems usually ends in disaster.
bksenior 8y ago
Leeches used to be common medical training, Penicillin was literally created by a pro who went against his training. Training is often helpful for pattern mataching, but make no mistakes, your doctor can kill you and your teachers can mislead. Everyone is faking it.
- nharada 8y ago
  There's a difference between "faking it" and "trying your best but making mistakes". Trained pilots still crash airplanes, but I'm not getting on a plane flown by some random passenger.
  - bksenior 8y ago
    You're confused. Faking it is still doing your best to meet your own knowledge and standards. No one is going and just trying to fuck it up.
johnjohnsmith 8y ago
I'd like to offer a few decades of perspective on your claim. I've been programming for 30+ years. When I sit down to code, most of the time I've thought through it before even typing and am ~99% confident I won't hit a roadblock. I've spent half my life mastering my programming skills. BUT: I'm a high-level technical lead / product lead, so I only get to write code a few times a month and it is more for stress-release because I've mastered it (and because I am a mentor to / lead 30+ programmers and this gives me a chance to interact with them). If I wrote code 100% of the time I'd being winging it 1% of the time. So in this regard you are correct. However, because of how corporations work, once you've demonstrated proficiency at "junior level work" you move up to the next big challenge. Yes, that sounds pejorative, but coding is not hard compared to the next levels of competency: programming is junior level, software architecture is senior level, product roadmap is staff level, corporate direction is above that. Sorry if that hurts your butt, but knowing the latest JS framework or how to optimize your C++ is trench-work compared to convincing the CTO where your division should invest its R&D budget for the next 5 years. Because there is no "school" for learning how to plan your company roadmap, you really do have to wing it and learn from experience. And since shit is changing so fast... well, sure there are basic principles studied is business (that sometimes are useless for strategy but are good for tactics)... but in tech, it very much is "wtf is going to happen next and is this the right choice." Sure there is an executive board, and vice presidents gunning for your role, but you REALLY are winging it at C-level unless you are in your 70's and have helmed multiple large companies. So from a top's down view from higher-importance positions, winging it is simply part of the job.
- pinusc 8y ago
  I believe the phenomenon you're talking about is called "Peter principle" [1], which states that "people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. In other words, an employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle edit: punctuation and wording
  - yesenadam 8y ago
xapata 8y ago
Paraphrasing Plato (quoting Socrates): The more I learn, the less I know. Highly trained, competent people often encounter situations they're unfamiliar with. That's what keeps the job exciting. To believe otherwise suggests either lack of training, or ...
seem_2211 8y ago
Agreed. I think there's a combination of things here - STEM type subjects for example seem to lend themselves to well defined processes and training, whereas things that are a bit more ambiguous (law, journalism, management, politics) leave a lot more space to make things up as you go along. I think there are benefits to both, but whenever I see someone complain about everyone winging it, I think they show their incompetence and lack of professional development. I work in a very fluid field (I recruit salespeople), so the rules are much less defined than if I were building rocketships or bridges or whatever, but there's still an abundance of work out there giving guidance on how things can be done. You see the same things in startups. The successful ones are emulating a lot of the lessons learnt by people who came before them, and then innovate in a small area. The unsuccessful ones are "innovating" on everything.
- CM30 8y ago
  This is true, though I suspect success also comes from knowing which lessons to take from other companies and when to apply them to your project/business. A lot of design decisions that work for Amazon won't work for a company with about 1000 times less customers, resources and manpower. An awful lot of startups also fail because they copy the big guys without realising that they're nowhere near as successful just yet and that what works for a large site/business and what works for a small one aren't necessarily the same thing. It's certainly the cause for a lot of overengineering and early complexity.
zmmmmm 8y ago
I agree a little bit, but I think you're swinging the pendulum a little far the other way. I work in a highly regulated area with consequences similar to "bridges falling down", and guess what? At an individual level, everyone is still winging it. What we do have though is a lot of processes: mandated things like checklists, written down procedures, standards that we work to and second-checking by peer or senior colleagues. It's those that stop the "bridges falling down", but at a personal / career level - people are all still exhibiting those people-like behaviors - rushing their work, making all kinds of mistakes, big-noting themselves, saying stupid things, etc. We design processes that kind of concede that "everyone is winging it all the time", so that things still be ok anyway.
- kthejoker2 8y ago
  This is what I came here to post. We have checklists and processes specifically to thwart "winging it" and 1. It's amazing how many people ignore those checklists and processes in the name of winging it, and 2. It's amazing how despite dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people-years in an organization, sometimes there's still no checklist or process and winging it is all they've got.
- lapnitnelav 8y ago
  I relate to this so much. I work in one of those regulated areas (finance). Your comment has given me a new perspective on what I consider a developer hostile environment.

jamesrcole 8y ago

> Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. ... many areas of human endeavour tend to more commonly involve untrained people This seems to imply "if only everyone got adequate training". It's not like that, though. There's a lot of important, worthwhile endeavours that inherently involve having to figure things out as you go.

B0btheBuilder 8y ago

Even competent people with good training aren't perfect. Competent people make mistakes. You mention bridges, buildings, and ships, all projects built by massive teams of people and stringent processes. These massive teams of people and stringent processes are necessary exactly because people aren't perfect. I'm unclear what you mean by the article focusing on "untrained people", unless you're trying to claim that politicians and newspaper executives are untrained.

Sharlin 8y ago
Making occasional mistakes while applying formal knowledge seems to be qualitatively quite different from making suboptimal decisions because you’re improvising due to lack of such formal knowledge. In some domains you don’t have a choice; there are too many moving parts, decision making is of necessity based on noisy and incomplete information, the domain is too messy for formal models to be useful. You just have to intuit and improvise. This is more often than not the case when human interactions are involved. Trying to impose engineering solutions to social problems usually ends in disaster.

bksenior 8y ago

Leeches used to be common medical training, Penicillin was literally created by a pro who went against his training. Training is often helpful for pattern mataching, but make no mistakes, your doctor can kill you and your teachers can mislead. Everyone is faking it.

nharada 8y ago
There's a difference between "faking it" and "trying your best but making mistakes". Trained pilots still crash airplanes, but I'm not getting on a plane flown by some random passenger.
- bksenior 8y ago
  You're confused. Faking it is still doing your best to meet your own knowledge and standards. No one is going and just trying to fuck it up.

johnjohnsmith 8y ago

I'd like to offer a few decades of perspective on your claim. I've been programming for 30+ years. When I sit down to code, most of the time I've thought through it before even typing and am ~99% confident I won't hit a roadblock. I've spent half my life mastering my programming skills. BUT: I'm a high-level technical lead / product lead, so I only get to write code a few times a month and it is more for stress-release because I've mastered it (and because I am a mentor to / lead 30+ programmers and this gives me a chance to interact with them). If I wrote code 100% of the time I'd being winging it 1% of the time. So in this regard you are correct. However, because of how corporations work, once you've demonstrated proficiency at "junior level work" you move up to the next big challenge. Yes, that sounds pejorative, but coding is not hard compared to the next levels of competency: programming is junior level, software architecture is senior level, product roadmap is staff level, corporate direction is above that. Sorry if that hurts your butt, but knowing the latest JS framework or how to optimize your C++ is trench-work compared to convincing the CTO where your division should invest its R&D budget for the next 5 years. Because there is no "school" for learning how to plan your company roadmap, you really do have to wing it and learn from experience. And since shit is changing so fast... well, sure there are basic principles studied is business (that sometimes are useless for strategy but are good for tactics)... but in tech, it very much is "wtf is going to happen next and is this the right choice." Sure there is an executive board, and vice presidents gunning for your role, but you REALLY are winging it at C-level unless you are in your 70's and have helmed multiple large companies. So from a top's down view from higher-importance positions, winging it is simply part of the job.

pinusc 8y ago
I believe the phenomenon you're talking about is called "Peter principle" [1], which states that "people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. In other words, an employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle edit: punctuation and wording
- yesenadam 8y ago

xapata 8y ago

Paraphrasing Plato (quoting Socrates): The more I learn, the less I know. Highly trained, competent people often encounter situations they're unfamiliar with. That's what keeps the job exciting. To believe otherwise suggests either lack of training, or ...

seem_2211 8y ago

Agreed. I think there's a combination of things here - STEM type subjects for example seem to lend themselves to well defined processes and training, whereas things that are a bit more ambiguous (law, journalism, management, politics) leave a lot more space to make things up as you go along. I think there are benefits to both, but whenever I see someone complain about everyone winging it, I think they show their incompetence and lack of professional development. I work in a very fluid field (I recruit salespeople), so the rules are much less defined than if I were building rocketships or bridges or whatever, but there's still an abundance of work out there giving guidance on how things can be done. You see the same things in startups. The successful ones are emulating a lot of the lessons learnt by people who came before them, and then innovate in a small area. The unsuccessful ones are "innovating" on everything.

CM30 8y ago
This is true, though I suspect success also comes from knowing which lessons to take from other companies and when to apply them to your project/business. A lot of design decisions that work for Amazon won't work for a company with about 1000 times less customers, resources and manpower. An awful lot of startups also fail because they copy the big guys without realising that they're nowhere near as successful just yet and that what works for a large site/business and what works for a small one aren't necessarily the same thing. It's certainly the cause for a lot of overengineering and early complexity.

zmmmmm 8y ago

I agree a little bit, but I think you're swinging the pendulum a little far the other way. I work in a highly regulated area with consequences similar to "bridges falling down", and guess what? At an individual level, everyone is still winging it. What we do have though is a lot of processes: mandated things like checklists, written down procedures, standards that we work to and second-checking by peer or senior colleagues. It's those that stop the "bridges falling down", but at a personal / career level - people are all still exhibiting those people-like behaviors - rushing their work, making all kinds of mistakes, big-noting themselves, saying stupid things, etc. We design processes that kind of concede that "everyone is winging it all the time", so that things still be ok anyway.

kthejoker2 8y ago
This is what I came here to post. We have checklists and processes specifically to thwart "winging it" and 1. It's amazing how many people ignore those checklists and processes in the name of winging it, and 2. It's amazing how despite dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people-years in an organization, sometimes there's still no checklist or process and winging it is all they've got.
lapnitnelav 8y ago
I relate to this so much. I work in one of those regulated areas (finance). Your comment has given me a new perspective on what I consider a developer hostile environment.