Four Stages of Competence

There's a fifth stage where after some considerable time away from doing unconsciously competent thing, you come back and find you don't know how to do that thing anymore. By then it's probably a good time to retire.

It relates to how we learn. We have at least two modes of learning, experience [1] and, someone please suggest a better word, indoctrination. Take json in database as example, around mid 2010s, NoSQL databases were all the rage. Engineers starting their career at that era might think putting json in database is the default operation, after all that's what people say. On the other hand, seasoned relational database user might find it bonkers to put json into database. How would you ever join tables?

We make progress when we trust/indoctrinated by other people's work, including when the work doesn't work [2]. But we can hardly see other's point of view when what we experienced were different [3]

[1] https://collabfund.com/blog/you-have-to-live-it-to-believe-i...

[2] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/368350/scientific-researc...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

I’m surprised that this page lacks a criticism section. Models of staged development are not without their critics.

With any such model (maturity models for example) I always look for what is supposed to drive the transitions between stages. Often that is more interesting than the model itself.

In this model, a key driver seems to be “analysis”. Some contexts are less susceptible to that than others. Perhaps the ability to recognise that situation counts as analysis, but that’s not clear here.

How does the Peter Principle fit into that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Is Peter Principle regarded as something valid or more of a meme?

Potentially related? The unknown unknowns

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns