The Expert Beginner

They come to the conclusion that they’ve quickly reached Expert status and there’s nowhere left to go. They’ve officially become Expert Beginners, and they’re ready to entrench themselves into some niche in an organization and collect a huge paycheck because no one around them, including them, realizes that they can do a lot better.

It’s during the full lifetime of a project that a developer gains experience writing code, source controlling it, modifying it, testing it and living with previous design and architecture decisions during maintenance phases.

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

This hiring decision is more subconscious and rationalized than overt. It isn’t, “I won’t hire people that are better than me,” but, “those people just aren’t a good fit here with my ‘outside the box’ and ‘expert’ way of doing things.”

“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

As the Expert-Beginner-in-Chief, I’ve learned a pointed lesson. Since I don’t like being shown up by ambitious young upstarts, I begin to alter my recruitment process to look for mediocre “team players” that won’t threaten my position with their pie-in-the-sky “fingers in the ball” ideas.

The Advanced Beginner stage is the last one in which the skill acquirer has no understanding of the big picture. As such, it’s the last phase in which the acquirer might confuse himself with an Expert. A Competent has too much of a handle on the big picture to confuse himself with an Expert: he knows what he doesn’t know. This isn’t true during the

That’s all well and good for bowling and bowling alleys, but how is this comparable to real software development practices? Well, it’s relatively simple. Perhaps it’s a lack of automated testing. Giant methods/classes. Lots of copy-and-paste coding. Use of outdated or poor tooling. Process.

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