How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)

I've worked with several 'expert beginners' over my career. They think they're near the skill ceiling, but they're actually much closer to the bottom. They rose through the ranks despite not being particularly great at their jobs, and now find themselves having to indoctrinate others into their way of doing things. Any suggestion on how to improve the process is usually met with some form of "that's not how we do things around here", since the expert beginner feels threatened.

Preventing yourself from becoming an expert beginner doesn't mean you have to dedicate all your spare time to learning 200 different technologies, as some here have suggested. It's more about accepting that learning is a life-long practice. Knowing that less experienced coworkers still have things they can teach you. Understanding that there is still so much out there for you to learn, and being humble about that fact.

I've come to believe though, that they need humour. There's always a tendency to over-extrapolate, get hung up on typologies which crack under weight and to assume the model is the main thing going on. Humour gives them a productive "playing with ideas" vibe, keeps it honest.

In software development, for example, I always think that demographics play a big role. Every decade we get more young programmers than the last. Many older programmers "graduate out" one way or another. The resulting demographics are unusual, with a years of experience pyramid more like the military than most professions.

Technology, methods and philosophy change rapidly. This is both exasperated by and causal to the demographics, and the youth/pace of the field itself. A lot of software culture has this relationship with the demographics. Maybe 60yo developers are more likely to produce important new things, but they are outnumbered 100-1 by 20-somethings... enforcing youth biases, etc.

I think a lot of this essays thoughts on learning might be affected by software demographics. A lawyer, accountant or aviation engineer's thoughts on learning and career progression probably encompasses much longer time periods. In software, we think in much shorter timescales. Between the age of 22 & 27, a programmer has progressed through a "career." Between the age of 22 & 27, an accountant has progressed through a cadetship.

* It is fun to learn initially, to see something new working. Once you get something working not many people see fun in spending a lot of time in getting it to work better.

* There is huge amount of introductory materials (guides, tutorials, examples) but the amount of available materials falls drastically as you start to progress.

* Only some people are able to actually think in abstract terms required to "create" new knowledge based on existing facts. Beginners can advance quickly by "recreating" -- executing tutorials, copying existing code, etc. It is relatively easy to use these as building blocks for a simple application. But as you progress you have to figure out more and more new knowledge, understand underlying principles. This is what many people either don't feel comfortable doing or don't feel is necessary to do or are just plainly incapable.

* It gets more difficult to work with other people in your team as you create knowledge in a given topic. There is tendency to push back when team member tries to introduce something new that is not clearly recreation of accomplishment of somebody else available on the Internet.

* Creating new knowledge in the topic is a huge risk in that it is unknown payoff for large amount of honest work. There is not much risk in following existing tutorials, it is pretty much guaranteed that it is possible to recreate accomplishment others did. When you create new knowledge (for example new patterns, principles, guidelines) it is likely you are going to make mistakes. This fact may cause people uneasy and dissuade them from further advancement in the topic.

* Getting mediocre in any specific topic is frequently seen as good return on investment. For example, as an architect I would maybe not want to get expert at any of the frameworks I know. I see this as a reasonable tradeoff which allows me to tackle other problems as soon as I think I know "enough" about particular topic.

I think, that viewpoint is a bit narrow. The example, where the author tells the story how he started bowling the wrong way and reached a plateau, where he could not further progress, is a good one. And I'm sure there are numerous examples each one of us can tell of own experiences made when learning new skills.

In my opinion learning new skills fast is a great skill. And nowadays there are many resources available to us make this easy. But you will always reach a plateau, where further progression gets increasingly difficult. It's fascinating how this corresponds to larger patterns like the Gartner Hype Cycle [1].

The question is, what do you do when you reach a plateau? Do you invest more time and money? Maybe the skill level suits you well and you don't feel a need to progress further? Maybe deeper understanding is not necessary to do your job well? Maybe it's better to acquire different skills which you can combine instead of being an expert in one area alone?

I think there are many nuanced answers to that question and simply put blame on the expert beginner is not useful.

[1] https://blogs.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/files/2019/08/C...

It doesn't seem to ever become easy for me. I am always running into challenges and difficult obstacles once I overcome the procrastination issue. I am bullhorned about it, so I'll eventually get through. That, more than any particular strategy for learning, is the most important in skill acquisition.

Another component of skill acquisition is skill retention. You'll get rusty when you don't practice your skills, and in enough time, you'll lose your progress. This is probably more than anything else, a lifetime commitment so that you don't lose your progress in the knowledge or skills you picked up, so that in the long run you become better and better over time.

Think of it this way: You learned 10,000 useful "stable" facts about the world one year. Next year, you learned another 10K facts. But retention is exponential. Practice it long enough, the facts will last a lifetime.

Suppose a person have no strategy for retention. Let say he learned 10K facts, 75% decays away. Next year, he learned another 10K facts, but another 75% decays away. So he retained only 5,000 facts, but you retained 20,000 facts. Obviously, this is contrived, but it does illustrate why colleges and high schools aren't very effective. It's not that they don't teach, it's that the students forgot what they learned as soon as they finished a course.

I often get interested in a subject matter and then drop it some point. This often result in surface understanding of the subject. Just enough to sound smart. However the knowledge is retained. Should I ever return to a subject, I'll retain the knowledge from scratch, as sometime I do.

Sometime I was able to keep at a subject long enough to acquire some amount of true mastery.

Writing software is a bit like playing multiple sports. You can be good at one thing and poor at another, and as a result do great work on one project and be mediocre on another.

Writing code in the small, optimizing; architecting for change; architecting for scale in development; architecting for scale under load; architecting for scaling out vs up; all different skills.

Writing code functionally, vs procedurally, vs message oriented. Writing code with control flow vs data flow, and toggling between them. Crafting abstractions vs composing them. Many small parts put together elegantly vs one straightforward transparent monolith. Some skills are alternates, you can go either way and get as good results.

There are people who only know a few things. But on a suitably scoped project, that may be fine.

I liked the analogy about the quirky bowling style.

That has happened to me -several times.

I’m primarily self-taught in most of my tech. It has tended to result in very highly-developed, but narrow, skillsets. Not necessarily a bad thing, but “brittle.” It has happened so many times, that I no longer feel that I am an “expert.” I am now “experienced.” At least the first five letters match.

But it has been a long road to where I am now. Humility has been forced upon me, and I now have a lot of “narrow skillsets,” to the point that they inform each other. For example, a lot of the stuff I did in PHP has helped inform my work in Swift, and vice-versa.

I’m choosing to specialize in a specific discipline and tech stack, which, just by itself, gives me a lot to learn. I am working to develop a “broad base” in a small-ish venue, with a lot of “sharp peaks.”

It’s really humbling. The more I know, the more I know I don’t know. Also, since I am constantly trying out stuff I don’t already know, I’m a perennial “n00b.” Usually, this manifests by not always being aware of the jargon (I know the tech, but not the name). This may result, I suspect, in my being treated rather shabbily by folks in the field (It may also have to do with my age. I have found that the way people treat me changes radically, as soon as they find out that I'm "long in the tooth," so I now make it obvious to avoid that). This has helped me to just keep my damn mouth shut, and open it only to eat my humble pie.

I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...

That being said, very great article that describe well and nicely what I have personally experienced in a sme company that was bought by a big tech group at some point: - when I arrived, the core team was already there with some having personal ties. A few beginners that took the mediocre manager as mentor, that took himself his manager as mentor - they learnt by themselves, mostly there, they were responding to diverging opinion with anger. - over the years, a few 'outsiders' arrived and try to change things by showing the problems and explaining that outside world do differently. - but each of them had to face the seniority argument reinforced by the group effect to justify that they can't be wrong. (Listen, we are 3, you are 1, it means that we are right and you are a pain in the ass to think otherwise. Doesn't count that you say that out of the company are unanimous on the subject...)

The worst (almost funny) case I remember was that:

- Person 1 (p1) and person 2 (p2) have a disagreement on how something has to be implemented.

- p1 is the boss favorite, so he is always right... so his solution will be implemented. No one listen to p2 that says that it is an inefficient idea, possibly problematic and that is why no-one does it this way outside. (No-one? In fact they found one case over 100 of outside projects that did that, so that gave them confirmation that they were right...)

- p1 engine solution is implemented and p2 has to do a component working with that, but that does not work well at all, very slow for basic operations, lots of unexpected deadlocks and issues like that. Another manager complains about the issues.

- P2 decides to give a try reimplementing the engine with his solution. That is completed is no time and it is excellent: performance x1000, no lockup, no more issues with basic operations.

- results are shown to mediocre manager. But instead of accepting and going this way, he blocks the thing and can't accept that his favorite was wrong. So says that there should be a bug in P1 implementation and give him as much time as needed to test and look at it.

- after 1 months, P1 did everything he could with his solution to fix it without using the solution of P2. He comes proudly with his engine is now 10x faster than initially.

- but so, 10x vs 1000x is a no match, and P1 solution was still rigged with issues. So it is finally P2 solution that is used 'out of choices'. BUT... as manager still does not accept that he and P1 were not right. He said: ok we use P2 solution, but you will have to embed and support P1 implementation in the final product. Not to be used but maybe one day...

- conclusion of the story? Evaluation time arrived. Did P2 got a good eval? That would be logic, he saved the product, gave an important perf and stability boost to the solution. But no, he got the worst! Manager said that P1 had to take depression pills because of P2... Not because his solution was wrong and couldn't accept, learn and improve from it. Buuuut: P1 got the maximum grade!

Perhaps a more clear way to think of that is in terms of comfort and bell curves. The left extreme of the bell curve is easy to both identify and understand for anybody beyond the left end. Those are the people at the low end who perform below accepted baselines.

Less well understood are people at the right end of the bell curve, who drastically out perform other developers. In all objectivity the people at the right end of a bell curve have as much as in common with the median population swelling into the middle of the curve as the supposedly incompetent people on the left end.

Think of this in terms of risk and popularity. When you are below the middle of the bell curve everything to the right of you is better performing. You can increase your performance by moving closer to the middle of the curve by doing what is popular.

Once you get to the middle of the curve you have to make a firm decision: remain comfortable in your current posture and let popularity dictate your approach or take risks to further increase performance beyond the population median. In that regard the populations at both the extreme left and right ends of the bell curve are doing things that are extremely unpopular. You cannot become an expert without fully embracing that reality.

An expert beginner is a person at the median of the bell curve or just to the left of it. They have mastered their skills to that point and refuse to make changes or take risks necessary to advance further.

As a front-end developer I frequently encounter expert beginners. People who have mastered some framework/convention, but doesn't really understand how their technology really works and are hostile to improvements that don't make use of their favorite framework/convention. To outside observers the expert beginner is clearly identifiable as performance is objectively measured with numbers without regard for approach.

The reality of programming is that most often than not you do not need to be an expert to do a job well. I would even say that being an expert programmer is all about sticking to only basic things. The more you try to be smart and "on the edge" the more you or someone who inherits your code will fail. If I would get 1$ for every trendy abstraction or framework, then I would not retire, but probably could buy a new PC or something.

IMHO it all boils down to ego trips. Everyone thinks he is the superstar, ninja or 10x and everyone else just a poser. "I'm the smartest one" should be the motto of IT. If you think that you are the one that can push the whole community forward then you are probably delusional. I think I'm a moderately advanced developer, but some of the people that I met along the way were just crazy smart, highly productive and - here is the surprise - nowhere near the top. This delusion of grandeur is especially common in people that are pampered in the business. If I would name them, then I would be instantly downvoted, but just stop and try to imagine what people I mean. I'm guessing you won't have any problem.

In the end, your project does not need you to be an expert, your team does not need it, the business does not as well. Only your ego.

Long live the "expert beginner"!

I took a break to be a manager for a while, which turned out to both be an incredible learning experience AND enough pressure relieved from the daily code grind that I was able to rekindle my passion for code.

Started writing a lot outside of work, realized I really like cryptography, studied that, became competent enough to even figure out what TYPE of beginner I want to be, etc. it’s very satisfying.

I’m around four years into that journey now, I’ve returned to a coding path where I get to actually learn while building, and I’m excited.

The expert beginner is a surprisingly easy trap to fall into. I also think we do this TO people when we trap them in a role and give them very little flexibility in execution.

They will begin to specialize in doing a bad thing well without understanding what they’re doing, especially if they aren’t given mentorship.

Maybe not the best way to learn, but in such a technologically complex world, it can sometimes be more effective...

More than once I have seen a peer or a whole engineering department of brilliant people going down a technical rabbit hole for weeks for intellectual satisfaction, where instead I will just take a step back, walk to the manager and try to work a different take for a solution that can be implemented in a few hours/days even if the business goal is slightly moved.

Yet I'm definitely not a good professional software developer in terms of code "quality", and don't consider myself very smart compared to my peers.

Edit: formating

His code has absolutely no sense of quality, doesn't employ any sort of standard design patterns or style, has no semblance of architecture and is an absolute hacky rats nest of code that falls apart with any change because of how interdependent it is.

The other day I was sent some of his updated code, which had no version control and had randomly added an extra 150 files to the project. It turns out the majority of those files where duplicated from elsewhere in the project and apparently it was my job to find where the changes were among that mess.

It's like he learnt to program decades ago and then never opened a book or looked at anyone else's code since.

Other influences:

* Skill level of coworkers * No time is dedicated by the team to abstractions / refactoring due to deadlines, or personal preference etc. * The technology being used is limiting or used in a limiting way.

If you never push your boundaries you'll never get better. Going to 100% one time will have a lasting effect. If you instead only go to 80% all the time you'll only get better at doing a mediocre job.

However, the goals might be misaligned here: Your employer and coworkers might not be interested in your personal growth. Instead they want you to "Get stuff done."

The skill degrees indeed are relative, and in the field of programming are dynamic. Of any one skill to put in permanence is perhaps an open-mindedness. It is a readiness to learn, not much an ability to master.

Lots of excellent programmers don't stop learning, they just discover the wisdom of 'good enough for the time-being'.

Expertship is lonely, beginnership is open an dynamic. The author projected the whole skill advancement spectrum onto the single grade of Beginner, as if beyond Expert lied a void or infinity.

I believe, paradoxically, beyond Expert is ... a Beginner. Either by humbleness, or by need to discover a new field, or by age, or boredom, or wisdom.

Programming has to be a team activity. If you happen to handle a project part by yourself, your future self or someone to work on your code after you is your current team.

If you're on the team already, then you keep learning from your mates as long as you let your mind stay open to it.

Or maybe that's just me. Also, I'm not going to work on mathematical proofs for something good, just to see my work disregarded because it's "too complicated".

Learn new stuff at home on your own time, put it on github, it'll be fun, ignore your family and your friends.

And the helpful comments here for someone who is doing 12-hour days is to meditate and go for a walk?

Work 7 hours and go home, your life will be better.

For one, it relies much on hypotheses about internal though processes, which makes it basically unfalsifiable. Then the author is in my view shooting himself in the foot with the bowling analogy, namely by describing how he noted that he didn’t improve anymore and went to ask a colleague for advice. How would the same not be possible or even likely for the “expert beginner”?

All of this is much more easily and briefly explained by motivation - for many people in technology, technology is simply not a passion! For them it is just a tool and like also the article mentions, there are few reasons in many companies to spend more time on perfecting your craft - in fact, it might be strictly worse than building career-enhancing relationships. This is especially true as someone not in a technical position is often not able to assess the quality of the output.

Most Dev's stop with App dev and business design. Some go on to UI or compiler performance. System a little and communications and electronics almost never.

As the author puts it, many a developer gets hired and eventually they "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".

In my experience, that is what does happen. There is no incentive to do better, and the paychecks in IT happen to be pretty large.

I progressed the most as a software developer when I wanted to be hired again after striking out on my own for a bit.

What I learned from striking out on my own was that my software development knowledge and abilities may have worked in previous contexts but not where I wanted to be as a next step of my career. While I could have been promoted at a previous job that wouldn't have proven anything on the open job market. This is probably where a lot of dissonance often occurs. People are Senior or Lead developers at one place for a long time then suddenly are out of a job and cannot find another one.

So I worked hard to improve in a number of ways because I was highly incentivized to do so - there was no "current position" to fall back on.

I had not experienced it until the past year. If this article does not resonate, if you have not worked with one, count yourself lucky.

I am regularly astounded by the lack of extremely basic skills I have seen in the places I have worked recently. For the love of god, just read a single book or take a single class on software development.

People argue: "Well, most shops don't really need good developers." I call BS on this. Every place I have worked at are trying to make money and keep the team from getting canned, and a bad developer will take you two steps back for every one step forward.

There was a person at my last job, nobody knew why they kept him around. He had a good 10 years on most of the team, but his code was easily the lowest quality, and he constantly fought with the rest of the team around attempts to improve code quality.

We hated him. He was totally stale and had given up on self improvement. We wanted him GONE. What happened? Most of the team quit and he is still there.

The old way is the formal, with external motivations and structures. Maybe there's a curriculum, like accountancy has. Maybe there's a coach, like in sports. One can spend a long time in the "infant stage," learning by mimicry.

A young karateka spends years practicing motions in the air, with form carefully observed and corrected by a teacher. This lets learners access the knowledge of karate as a whole, without needing an intuitive understanding of why this elbow must point that way while performing kick two in exercise X.

To jive with the author's bowling analogy... Imagine a child bowling with just a ball. No pins. No aley. A teacher corrects form: posture, the swing of the arm, the final position. Once the child starts bowling for real, all their habits will be good. The known deficiencies of poor form are avoided, and the risk of hitting an "expert beginner" dead end is low.

This kind of formality is only possible when the domain is well known, and "correct form" is well understood. I suspect that these systems require generations to build. They also run the risk of devolving into ritual, superstition even.

The informal, more autodidactic culture does risk an "expert beginner trap," a premature peaks in skill that requires formal (or intentional) training to defeat. OTOH, "expert beginner" is not just a trap. It's a useful goal, for a lot of situations.

If you are going to fight the bully next week, karate is not a good answer. Those highly refined skills have little intrinsic short term roi.

It's hard not to read this and sense a bit of bellyaching about how the market for software engineers isn't a pure meritocracy where those who are using all the latest tools with pitch-perfect architecture are the only ones who get hired and promoted. And it seems to totally ignore the real world in which legacy software, with all its warts, does exist and can't be thrown out.

"Bowling is like Software" does a good job at pointing out a common problem(You can develop and get stuck using a style which has a lower ceiling than other styles).

I still think "Bowling is like Software" is a bad analogy though.

Bowling is a one-dimensional task: Its the same problem every time, so some styles will likely have much higher ceilings than others. Software is far more complex: some styles work well for some problems but poorly for others. If there is actually a generic fix-all style, its likely very abstract, difficult to grock, and probably involves a lot more math than we'd like to admit.

So I don't think theres anything wrong with getting good at one style, even if it has a low ceiling because even if you learn another style later, you will probably want to go back in your toolbox at some point in the future to mix in some of the original style.

Indeed this is the idea behind the beginners mindset[1], where we assume our knowledge and experience may be faulty. That we have to unlearn our skills to make a further leap. That when you assume you’re an expert, you’ve already lost.

So I tend to question the Dreyfus model in general. I want to see how capable people are at getting skills, but also how readily they can discard hard won skills. Similar to a sunk cost trap, we can needlessly hold onto our skills and hesitant to think we need to let them go and rethink the whole approach.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin

2. Aggressive pushes to deliver over creating something solid or experimenting with different archs

3. The selection process doesn't look for experience.. they have been looking for leetcoders that haven't changed since college

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327669

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19467367

Is every carpenter without interest in furniture design an expert beginner, or just a carpenter?

Aren't developers who aren't into design/business just programmers? Why is this bad?

Every time I try to start doing things "The Right Way" I end up getting nothing done. In frustration, I revert back to my old technical debt building ways just to try to move forward at all.

-side note- I didn't even know it was possible to bowl without sticking your fingers in the holes... it's almost as absurd as not doing any automated testing.

Am I an Expert Beginner suffering from Dunning-Kruger and delusions of competence?

Or am I an actual Expert suffering from Imposter Syndrome?

I'm working as tech co-founder in a small team with junior devs, and I do some things "differently" for what seem to me to be good reasons.

How do I tell?

Terrible fallacy on so many levels. "I can't convince you to hire me, therefore I'm bad". "I can convince you to hire me, therefore I'm great".

I've bounced around quite a bit myself, but some of the best work I've done has been in situations where I could have slacked off and phoned it in. That was typically prevented by the opportunity to perform challenging work that allowed me to learn, not by fear of falling behind some imaginary peer.

The problem with many workplaces is that challenging, interesting problems are few and far between and that is by design. Why take on the risk to the business by having technical knowledge in-house to solve the hard stuff? It's expensive, and large chunks of that investment can just walk out the door. Most companies would happily pay for solutions from other businesses that specialize, and then ask devs to glue these mismatched pieces into a semi-cohesive whole.

This sort of glue-work is ubiquitous, even in companies that ostensibly specialize in making their own software. How much time is spent wrangling all those amazing, productivity-enhancing dev tools that have proliferated? The goal is typically to offload work for a fraction of what it costs to keep a dev employed. New businesses are cropping up all the time trying to sell tools to the big boys, so they can in turn keep their devs focused on core competencies. The companies that specialize in tooling of course all sell to each other as well, it's a little bit of a cartel, but this endless cycle of tool churn is nothing new.

If you approach this environment as a newbie, and you are concerned about becoming an expert, it's likely that you'll only make progress on that goal in fits and starts. Companies grow, job roles become both over-specified in their requirements and narrower in their responsibilities, and all the while you are expected to learn new tools that allow your employer to save on skilled labor. It's rare to find a job where mentoring and career advancement are given genuine care. Employers have an incentive to keep employees tuned for specific, ever-narrowing roles.

One of the few consistent places I've been able to find learning opportunities has been in start-ups. The overarching trend is the same there too, but at the beginning those roles are not yet so clearly defined and you can bite off as much as you want. You probably won't be rewarded for doing so, and it's a bit of a crapshoot, but it is one small advantage to those environments.

"Sep 30", this one says. Hmm… can't be 2019, because I read this years ago, I'm sure.

The only indicator of year I could find is that the comments to the article are 7 years old.

A fine example of this is a new hire getting anxious and defensive because the git branching strategy at the company isn't the branded one they're accustomed to (e.g. git flow).

The older I am the more I'm convinced that development is not individual thing - it's a team sport.

Hey, company: divide your workday into 4h work for external projects and 4h work for team development.

Smart, mature developer, will realize that the most inhibiting phenomenon for him is usually the job itself.

Get to the point, fast and quick.

I’m sure you have many valid and interesting points of view about your job, experiences, and wants. I’m interested to hear about them. You could offer some unique experiences I can learn from or maybe there’s some tidbit I can offer you.

But unless you learn how to get to the point first, I don’t care. Even now after 3 minutes of perusing your entry I’ve lost any sense of what it was about.

To finish up, I’m not trying to be evocative, negative, or anything. I just want to encourage better ways of writing, thinking, and publishing.

Always consider your readers first. They don’t have as much time to parse what you write as it takes you to write it.