The Expert Beginner

In the end, it all makes perfect sense. Expert Beginners arrive at their stations by default rather than merit. As such, they have basically no practice at persuading anyone to see the value of their ideas or at demonstrating the superiority of their approach. Instead, the only thing they can offer is the evidence that they have of their qualificat

The actual subtext is, “I’m in charge and I get to define good and bad, so good is me, and some amount less good is you.”

Is your solution one that she understands immediately? Too simplistic. Does she not understand it? Over-engineered and convoluted. Are you younger than her? It’s full of rookie mistakes. Older? Out of touch and hackneyed. Did you take longer than it would have taken her? You’re inefficient. Did it take you less time? You’re careless. She will keep

If the solution different from hers is presented by someone that also has a master’s, she will pivot to another subject.

To see this in action, consider the following: 1. Version control isn’t really that important if you have a good architecture and two people never have to touch the same file. 2. We don’t write unit tests because our developers spend extra time inspecting the code after they’ve written it. 3. Yeah, we don’t do a lot of Java here, but you can do any

“Whenever someone says ‘I’m not book smart, but I’m street smart,’ all I hear is, ‘I’m not real smart, but I’m imaginary smart.’” I had a bit of a chuckle the first time I read that, but it’s not actually what I, personally, think when I hear people describe themselves as “street smart” rather than “book smart.” What I think is being communicated i

“Well, that didn’t work, Jones, but you learned a lot from it, so we’re promoting you to Principal Rocket Builder and having you lead version two, you rock star, you!”

As an industry, we get away with this because people have a substantially lower expectation of software than they do of rockets.

a person or people in positions of authority that have the culturally lethal combination of not knowing much; not knowing what they don’t know; and assuming that, due to their own expertise, anything they don’t know isn’t worth knowing.