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 Use of outdated or poor tooling.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.

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.”

The Expect Beginner has, through his actions and example, created additional Expert Beginners and has, in fact, created a culture of Expert Beginnerism.

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.

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.”

“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!”

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 Expert Beginner has nowhere to go because progression requires an understanding that he has a lot of work to do, and that is not a readily available conclusion. You’ll notice that the Expert Beginner is positioned slightly above Advanced Beginner but not on the level of Competence. This is because he is not competent enough to grasp the big pic