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I hate that clay pot metaphor it gets trotted out to justify everything and I dont find it particularly insightful. I feel like in software the take-away should
by honkycat 6y ago
I hate that clay pot metaphor it gets trotted out to justify everything and I dont find it particularly insightful. I feel like in software the take-away should be "throw away your crappy previous attempts and keep iterating" but usually people use it to argue "dont plan anything and ship the poorly built prototype"
- ska 6y agoThat isn’t really a problems with the analogy, if people are choosing to ignore it.
- danaliv 6y agoI would tell those people the good pots weren’t the first ones, they were the last ones. Which suggests smashing the poorly built prototype and starting over. In other words I read it as an elaboration on “practice makes perfect.” Or, there’s no substitute for experience. (100% true in my... er, experience, across several different fields.) One of the first pieces of advice I got in my career was about a study on expertise. (Wish I had a reference.) The authors wanted to know what made the experts different from the non-experts. You know what the difference was? Reps. That’s it. Now, as someone who has taught a technical, challenging, and all-encompassing field—by which I mean a field that covers not just a knowledge domain but also psychomotor skills and personal values—I can tell you that some people do bring more natural ability at the start. But even those folks don’t achieve mastery without the reps.