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Comment by louthy | Hacker News Reader

I think a better phrase is "everybody is winging it", because once you get good at something, then you tend to end up working on something that's at the edge of your current understanding, either through promotion or some sense of seniority in the industry.

This isn't necessarily true for all jobs, but I think it's especially true in the software industry. I've been a CTO for 17 years, but I still feel like I'm winging it. It doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing, I have enough experience to make good judgements; but to be the best at something you often have to be on the edge of your understanding at any one point in time.

I don't remember exactly when I realised that everybody is winging it (to one extent or another), but it made it easier to trust my own judgement, it made it easier to push for something I believed in, but it also gave me a sense of how little I still know - which helps me to not get too arrogant about my current abilities.

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I'm going to go with "Not everything is designed, or planned. Sometimes the result is just the sum of a bunch of not necessarily coordinated decisions."

Some people know a lot about what they are doing and are highly skilled. A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing it. What I think you realize when you grow up is not every decision or outcome was deliberately thought out and coordinated. Sometimes things just happen. They can even be the result of a collection of individual people who each is highly knowledgeable about their individual contributions with no single person responsible for the ultimate outcome. I'd imagine this is the way something like an automobile is designed.

Ruuning a business is like playing a piano at a concert, except the keys sometimes change position and sometime disappear completely.

I think that’s life, except that sometimes the piano becomes a cello, then a pair of bongo drums.

>> Not everything is designed, or planned. Sometimes the result is just the sum of a bunch of not necessarily coordinated decisions.

I'll go one further. Almost always. Organizations are basically distributed systems; you theoretically could have fully coordinated decisions with an elegant and efficient network topology (i.e., the decisions involve only those people with relevant information, and don't pass through umpteen unrelated routing layers), but I've yet to see that. Invariably those orgs favoring coordination (CP from a CAP perspective) are slow and inefficient, with too many meetings seeking signoff from stakeholders who have no relevant knowledge or responsibility. The more 'agile' orgs (including suborgs routing around that kind of inefficiency) end up with eventually consistent systems, more AP, and, well, yeah, they're necessarily not coordinated. Hopefully they still have clearly defined areas of responsibility, interfaces, and useful sets of abstraction, but those abstractions are leaky, and the interfaces themselves developed as needs arise.

>A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing it.

Well, sometimes they have to. There is the famous example where a professional concert pianist realizes when the orchestra starts that she practiced the wrong piece. They happen to have been making a documentary, so we get to see her face as she realizes what is happening. And then she "wings it", and manages to play very well anyway.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXnYMl_SuA

This is trully amazing!

I was going to add something about improvisation and jazz. While it’s not planned out you wouldn’t describe them as “not knowing what they’re doing” nor are they just blindly mashing the keys.

They’re feeling their way through a dynamic situation guided by skill, experience and luck.

Really the complete opposite of winging it. Only possible after immense study. And what your seeing is what they are most comfortable playing. They’ll push themselves out of their comfort zone offstage when they aren’t being paid.

That’s not what is normally meant by “winging it” though. That’s applying deep, rigorous expertise, just faster than normal.

>Some people know a lot about what they are doing and are highly skilled. A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing it.

If I may torture your example to defend the GP, concert pianists trying to improve will wing it during the steps leading up to the stage: negotiating with a venue, exploring new ways to practice, writing or choosing music pieces, and the all the other tasks unknown to this layman.

I like this take. A lot of times for an experienced team there are multiple solutions to a problem that will work and you can quickly start with the one that seems to best fit the circumstances... if circumstances change (and you'll notice if you've been doing it a while) then you can often (and with some hard work) transition to a different solution and still hit timeline (or immediately warn of the miss). If they team works together well, this happens quickly, if not seamlessly. If you don't have experience, just figuring out which way to start is a huge effort and changing direction even a larger struggle, and you're almost guaranteed to take longer, with higher risk, or worse product.

What I found making a few hundred sourdough loaves over the last 2 years, is that there is a recipe (or several), and you should follow it... but then unexpected things happen (changing starter/temp/gluten, humidity/hydration, forgot something or want to add something, different size loaf or tools/oven, not enough time, missed alarm) and the skill is in knowing quickly what to do and how to work with it to make things right. Rarely do I make what I consider a perfect loaf, because I don't make 100/day every day... but even though I often make one/two mistakes or changes, recovery is automatic and almost imperceptible in the final product.

> A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing it.

The concert pianist couldn’t wing it with an oboe, violin or trumpet. But that’s what the full stack dev does. Wing it with this service, that framework, some other language, etc

"Real impostors don't have impostor syndrome"

To me, that is even better.

It means that you care and you are in an uncomfortable zone, which means you are probably growing.

Could it be that the more you know, the more you realise how much more there is to know? That would explain the feeling of impostor syndrome in more senior people - they're judging by different standards.

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