21–30 of 37 posts
When respected people in the field value your opinion and perceive you as their peer.
A lot of people refuse to respect or give value to his opinion, much less see him as a peer.
Four stages of competence[1]: * Unconscious Incompetence: The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it. * Conscious Incompetence: Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it. * Conscious Competence: The individual understands or knows how to do some…
But does Unconscious Competence == Expert ?
Four stages of competence[1]: * Unconscious Incompetence: The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it. * Conscious Incompetence: Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it. * Conscious Competence: The individual understands or knows how to do some…
The weird thing about unconscious competence, is that when things do become so intuitive and second nature I've personally started to find that I feel as if I don't know something. If asked... I feel I can't answer. If interviewed I'll probably fail. Yet I also find that when put in front of a problem the solution just presents itself. What's weird about this is that in feeling I know so little about things that I've…
I have gone back to unconscious incompetence in some subjects I haven't touched for a decade, that I used to know better than most anyone I worked with.
It is embarrassing sometimes. :-)
I am still happy that I reinvented myself as a script programmer instead of a system programmer; what is fun for me is sitting down and generating lots of functionality in a short time. I can go to work with a smile and low risk of burnout.
On the subject of expert or not: I guess that locally I am considered an expert on what I do, but I don't see me as one because I know how the real experts are.
That said, I'd say you're an expert when you know what the bad parts are, why they're wrong, and why they're there anyway.
You know you are an expert when you start saying "it depends" to questions you are asked.
You know you are an expert when you start saying "it depends" to questions you are asked.
Incidentally, I'm currently doing some research on a problem and it pains me that I have to constantly come up with the justifications to the solutions I find proposed. There's a lot of cookbook math around.
You'll know you're an expert when you don't care about being labeled as such. You know your stuff really well, so well that it's a matter of intuition. If you care about being an expert, you're not one.
So experts are people that don't think about what they're doing?