I have been mulling this topic over in my head for a while now… because on some level I know it is just true, things have to be simple for me to understand. I do not deal with complexity well - I need to unravel it before I am comfortable– and this is I think is where my strengths lie.
I came across this research article which talks about why people who tend to be incompetent are more likely to not know that they are in fact incompetent – so I decided that I must write this to do my bit to help correct this.
When I was mentioning the potential blog title to a few people – they were very quick to jump to my defence ( bless them ), which in its self is interesting – a belief that being bright is a complement and conversely not being bright is an insult ( as if you could change it ). Granted the title is some what provocative – but at its heart is really just someone saying – I know my limits, and people want to defending that.
When you talk about being bright, it is open ended or looking forward – it by definition has not end point. When you talk about someone being not bright, it is like looking backward over a journey that has just come to an abrupt halt – like there is no future.
This I think might be why people like to operate at a level of complexity that is just beyond them, and they are happy with the black magic that is going on around them ( because without the black magic what is to prove that what they are doing is complex ). Forcing them to operate at a level of unconscious incompetence.
For me the moral of the story is simply this : being a humble programmer is not about underselling yourself, it is just about being realistic, it forces you to face all task with the correct respect for your competency level – which is put much more eloquently by Edsger W. Dijkstra in his closing statement at the ACM Turning Lecture of 1972 ( The Humble Programmer ) :
“We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.”
1 comments:
As I see it there are two forms of "brightness" - IQ and EQ (the latter being the basis for that articles conclusions I believe - low EQ generally implies low ability for accurate self assessment). You seem to have plenty of both, and you're definitely brighter on the IQ scale than I am - perhaps that's why I defend you :-)
Your point about unconscious incompetence through trying to justify the complexity of what you do rings true...
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