It's a good thing to think of yourself as a noob. I too think of myself as a noob. I believe it has to do about knowledge and experience. You know the old adag

It's a good thing to think of yourself as a noob. I too think of myself as a noob. I believe it has to do about knowledge and experience. You know the old adage "The more you know, the more you know you don't know." To me this is very true. I was reprimanded the other day, by management because I said in a presentation "I don't know" when discussing how to solve a particular problem. When having a discussion there is a few rules that must be followed in order for you to have a meaningful exchange of opinions that brings you closer to some sort of consensus. One of these is principle of charity: "interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation." My manager did the the opposite of this principle and assumed that when I said "I don't know" that that meant that I was going to find out on my own and disregard his opinion and directive. What I meant was that "I don't know, let's gather a group of experts, let them gather information and interpret this in such a way that he can take a proper decision on what to do next." I regret that I wasn't this clear when communicating with him to begin with. To me, in IT nothing is more worse than someone who claim they know everything, have all the answers and don't want to listen. Recently on I recently read the quote "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge." I think this complements the above quote very well, and is something important that we all need to be aware of. To be a noob means at least you have the self-insight to understand that you have much more to learn, and that you are willing to collaborate with your colleagues to achieve more wisdom.