Never Heard of It

If someone at the start of their career asked me about having this problem now I'd instinctively tell her or him that it's not worth working with the people you find yourself being dishonest around. But how do you find the good people? It's hard, and it's when you are least experienced that you will have the most trouble differentiating between the knowledgeable and the hangers on.

This is a huge huge problem in our industry. And I think a lot of it stems from the fact that 3 years ago when I knew nothing but the HTML & CSS I picked up on hobby projects and a couple college CS classes, what was I? I was a web developer. What am I now after 3 years of real projects, working with devs that know far more than I do, reading a ton, going to talks, and taking on increasingly more responsibility on projects? I'm still a web developer. In that context it's very challenging to be the person who is new to the field because everyone wants you to be the expert, and can be mean when you're not.

You say: "I haven't taken a look at it yet, what do you like about it?"

They say whatever.

You say: "Wow, that does sound pretty great, I'll definitely have to check that out." And then you do so, sure.

Human psychology is such that they often will actually react by liking you BETTER than if you had (presumably truthfully) said "Oh, yeah, it's great." Because you demonstrated that you valued their opinion, listened to their opinion, and then told them that they were right on!

I always know that when I have to talk to a group of women I have to be well prepared. Men are generally easy to bullshit, they won't ask questions like "could you explain exactly how that works?", at least not in front of their peers. Women seem to have less of an issue with it, especially when there are no men around to give them condescending looks.

"To ask a question is a shame for a moment. Not to ask the question is a shame for your whole life."

(The author of the book, a newspaper reporter covering crime and the Yakuza, gets very far in his career by asking "dumb" questions.)

> Sass’s new placeholder syntax is pretty great, isn’t it?

This question could be considered a leading question, especially when considering the context: I don't write CSS at all, and never have heard of it - why are you assuming I know what it is? I regularly write CSS, but don't know how to use Saas - why are you assuming I use Saas and find it useful? I've used Saas in the past, find it confusing, and have decided to stick to CSS - why are you assuming a tool you use is a tool I should also want use and like?

Just ask the question in a way that doesn't make assumptions!

I feel fortunate to work for a company that has a zero-tolerance policy for shaming others and their code knowledge. In fact, it's much more common to hear something like "I'm not familiar with that - could you teach me?" instead. Weekly, we show off new tools or techniques we've discovered so the chances of being left in the dark are slimmer. It leads to a lot more open discussions and a better overall base of knowledge across the entire company.

One reason why this remains a persistent problem, I've found, is that the more experience you gain, the more likely people are to treat you like a guru - or worse, the guru - which makes it more difficult to say "Sorry, I've not heard of that... could you fill me in?".

2 years later, he realized just how wrong he was.

With the truly stupendous number of potential things to know about today, not knowing something is the far-more-common case. And there shouldn't be any shame in not having heard about something.

It's scary - but it's so much better than actually knowing something and having your expertise dismissed because you've already blown your credibility.

Looked at another way, I suppose my readiness to admit I don't know things is slightly egotistical: when I say I know something well, I want motherf----- to believe me.

Being up front about what you don't know well is kind of the price you have to pay... well, that and actually knowing stuff in other areas.

I have met numerous people in my career who seem incredibly impressive when you first meet them, like they are so smart and know something about everything but if you try and pin them down on specifics you realize that they are mostly full of hot air and are just parroting something they heard somebody else say. These people can often get promoted fast, assuming that they can do it convincingly because for every person that called their bluff they left that sparkling first impression on 50 more.

I wonder if it's that they are so good at BS that they have convinced the organization that they really are an expert or whether the organization actually values people who can convincingly BS for more senior positions? If you are in a position negotiating a large contract for example, it's definitely a good thing to look like you know what you are talking about.

In many , many cases you can get away with this BS because the issue itself might not actually be very important. If you can say "uh huh yes, I am familiar with framework X" and the conversation moves on to something else because it was never really about framework X in the first place, admitting ignorance may not be the best strategy.

My manager at the time noticed this behaviour after a while and basically told me that the whole point of the internship is to learn, and no one would be surprised or disappointed if I didn't know some minutae about the field I was working in. In fact, most people enjoy sharing their knowledge, it makes them feel smart and useful.

This doesn't just apply on an internship - you might have been hired into a company as a respected, talented programmer, but the situation is still the same - you're there to share your knowledge with others, and be shared with in return, and use that cumulative knowledge to build a product.

Once you've 'looked stupid' once by asking a question, you'll quickly realise it's not so painful after all - and it saves the company a lot of time if you go 'actually, I've not heard of that', and it takes your colleague 5 minutes to explain, than having to Google for info and decipher Wikipedia articles and arcane documentation every time.

A book that helped me overcome it is called Mindset, written by the psychology researcher Carol Dweck. I can't recommend it highly enough. Apparently the problem gets worse as you gain skills, not better, if you don't consciously take steps to counter it.

I was just chatting with a friend this weekend that I also recommended the book to because he identified Imposter Syndrone as his major obstacle in life, even though he's highly accomplished and his blog is constantly on HN. Talking to him made me realize that it not only affects more people than I realize but that it probably also affects generalists more than specialists, since being T-shaped means by definition that you can only pick a few areas to go deep.

If you are confident enough, mature enough in yourself and work in an atmosphere that's mature enough not to criticise for it, saying "nope, that's new to me, is it something I should learn/look up?" is a good thing.

Meanwhile, my coworker would confidently answer with whatever he thought was correct. He would often be close, but he would also, alarmingly often, be completely wrong, to the point of describing behavior that had nothing to do with the product in question.

As luck would have it, none of his lies/misrepresentations ever mattered. Whatever prompted the questions ended up being unimportant, or the support issue was resolved through other means. He ended up promoted to manager, at which point the department imploded on itself under his watch. To my knowledge, he never had any idea how incorrect he was, since he was simply wildly confident in himself.

I think it's good advice to be aware of doing this but you can go too far in compensating. Don't derail other people's speech by riddling them with questions or admissions, but if they ask you if you know be honest.

In other terms, nodding to a speaker can mean "please continue", I think it rarely actually means "I understand completely".

Pointless to argue sex bias; who cares? It happens all the time that we feel our ignorance is on display. I revel in it, ask questions, find out if the other guy really knows what they're talking about.

"I go through periods of self-doubt about my qualifications as a web developer. I have a sense I’m not alone in this. Our field is by nature a generalists’ field, where expertise involves synthesis of concepts and technologies, not complete mastery of a single, static topic. It’s hard to know how to tell if you’re good at your job."

I'd say, I'd agree fully but you can look at it as an advantageous position, in my opinion.

The ability to bend a lot of different concepts/technologies that were put together by experts into something that solves the problem puts you in an important place.

I'd say show love for the open source community and the people who know everything about a particular framework or technology, but really it comes down to asking, "No, not familiar, what are the advantages of this [new thing] over what we've been doing?"

In an ideal situation, you're speaking with someone who will allow you to probe them on the subject with a series of "stupid" (sounding) questions till you have a good basic understanding of the topic.

Unfortunately, many people are not like that. They will simply think that you're stupid and move on to the next topic. Sometimes these may be people you want to make a good impression on, for a variety of reasons, so some diplomacy is required.

"That's not really my area of expertise, what do you mean by that?"

"I haven't looked into that much yet"

"I'm sorry, I don't know that word"

"I've been meaning to look into ____, can you give me the 5 second overview"

I can separate the world easily into two types of people: those who will asks questions if they don't understand, and people I'm unlikely to trust.

[1] - http://serenecode.org/2013/11/proper-education-is-a-must/

Unfortunately, it happens naturally and automatically, and is thus very difficult to overcome.

When I'm on sales calls, I now go out of my way to ask those questions of my own people.

I've gained a lot of trust from clients for being knowledgeable in the field of emerging tech. I've earned a lot of money by actually using it to provide solutions.

.killer-logo { margin-top:55px;} That might do the trick.

Edit: 42px would be best as your logo is cut off at the top of the letters.