Expert Beginners | Hacker News Reader

Expert Beginners

daedtech.com

33 pointsmoodguy10 comments

My version of imposter syndrome is worrying I'm actually an expert beginner. How can one ever really know? I have some risk factors: I've been in a small team at the same company for over a decade, I have some pretty strong opinions about the way things should be done (at least for the kinds of projects I work on), and I dislike and avoid most of popular frameworks out there (not because they're popular, but because they aren't aligned with my development philosophies). On paper that sure looks like I'm high-risk for Expert Beginnerism. Is there some test we can take to know?

Think you just took the test

Are you saying I clearly am, or clearly am not an expert beginner? That could be taken both ways.

No I'm just saying you did the analysis and read the article, so you should trust whatever conclusion you've come to. There is a follow up to that article I believe, which talks about how to get out of the Expert Beginner tangent.

How can you know? you can't really. About the best you can do is work with as many people on as many things as possible, in the hopes you come across people very skilled in things you are not, and open up new aspects to your job for you to learn.

Consider that fundamentally, even the best person in the world at a given thing may be stuck on a plateau. It does happen occasionally, see female shotputters all starting to cartwheel in 2006 before it became banned. It was legal at any point in time before that, but nobody did, even though each person becoming proficient often quickly broke their personal bests.

Well according to the article, if you're an Expert Beginner you might just end up with a checks notes... well-paying stable job and lofty title. Oh no!

I think hubris is unwanted. An accurate appraisal of someone else is hard if you cannot even appraise yourself. And nobody likes posturing.

Conways law helps here. Every interaction between two engineers is a unique numbered permutation. That can either have positive value or negative value based on each skill level. Even if one is a beginner and one is an expert.

I have a great deal of respect for people who ship lasting software, even if other people criticize their solutions.

I have a great deal of respect for people who write entire systems, even if other people criticise their code or nitpick it or want to rewrite it.

I have a great deal of respect for people who can do the entire thing by themselves.

How many silent engineers are holding the world together but don't talk and share their knowledge and skills? They don't have GitHub profiles. How do you evaluate their skill?

If other people were to evaluate my work and that be used as the benchmark to evaluate my skill and help me get jobs based on other people's perspectives of me as a developer.

Organisations want perfect candidates who are good at everything. (T shape individuals)

Given how fast the industry has grown, you'll get a big mix of talent in a software engineering department.

Bring someone in from another company and they could level the place with criticism that "they did it wrong".

The whole hubris thing gives me negative feelings.

I feel like I get stuck on expert beginner in most things. There arent many things I've gotten to Competent, if at all. Maybe low self esteem playing into it but I think my gut feeling is accurate on this.

[2013] I think

Confirmed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://daedtech...

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