Expert Beginner Dev's Know They Know Everything
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So you have an issue with programming methodolgies that can affect the product, timelines, people's sanity and probably profitability and instead of sitting down to dig into the issue he tells you to get back to work? The problem isn't ExpertDev. The problem is the manager.
cheers Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder wrote:
The problem is the manager.
Nailed it!! Very astute of you. You noticed the subtext of the story. I actually told the manager that it was crazy because of all the reasons you mentioned and he said,
Quote:
"[Contractor] is smart enough that I'm sure he is doing the right thing."
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He was an object of mirth for the few months that he blessed us with his presence.
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raddevus wrote:
a C# developer who pooh-poohs Java without ever having tried it
When the C# developer has tried Java he will still pooh-pooh it though :D Erik's blog on the expert beginner was in The Insider a while back. The problem is that the more you know the better you know what you don't know. That's why the good people are modest, while the people who know just a little bit shout the hardest.
Best, Sander arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript SQL Server for C# Developers Succinctly Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
Sander Rossel wrote:
The problem is that the more you know the better you know what you don't know.That's why the good people are modest, while the people who know just a little bit shout the hardest.
Two great truths. Too bad the whole world doesn't know them better.
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While reading this book, Amazon.com: The Expert Beginner eBook: Erik Dietrich: Kindle Store[^] I stumbled upon this...
Quote:
Expert Beginner's are developers who do not understand enough of the big picture to understand that they aren't actually experts. What I mean by this is that they have a narrow enough perspective to think that whatever they have been exposed to is the best and only way to do things. Examples include a C# developer who pooh-poohs Java without ever having tried it or a MySQL DBA who dismisses the NoSQL movement as a passing fad.
I've never seen this explained so well before. I finally know the term (Expert Beginner) to use for the contractor I worked with at a large mortgage bank who knew that he knew everything. This guy had convinced a publisher to publish his book so he basically threw it on my manager's desk and my manager hired him. It was proof enough that he was a genius. At one point I asked the contractor a question about his XML parsing code that he had written as part of a larger project. Me: I see you seem to have written some functionality that manipulates the XML. Why didn't you just use the XML classes built into .NET? ExpertDev:I tried those classes but they weren't any good so I wrote my own. Me <slowly>: Umm... First of all, you've now created proprietary code that everyone throughout the company has to examine and understand just to interact with your section of code now. That's one problem. ExpertDev: Well, I'm telling you the Microsoft libraries are 5 times slower than my code. Me: So you're telling me that you wrote better code than the .NET team at Microsoft? ExpertDev: All I can tell you is that mine parses the XML 5 times faster. I have performance data. Me: Yes, you're right. It is 5 times faster than the .NET XML DOM parser. That's because the .NET one parses it into a structured object that is easy to manipulate. The problem is that in
I replaced such an 'expert' who had written a book. He spent 3 months delivering sod all, so they got me in, and I delivered it in 2 weeks. Experts, fuck em. Oh, and then there was the USB expert. What a twat. Thought a transaction error was to do with the transaction translator needed to run full speed device on high speed hubs! He delivered shit for months till I lost patience and put my own code in the driver.
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Hair plugs are worse. Trust me. I had to train a technical bod from our New York distributer - good bloke, spoken to him on the phone loads of times. So he flew over and we meet for the product training ... And he had hair transplants. All the hair on his head was in little identical clumps, in absolutely straight rows and columns, and while you're talking to him your eyes are continually rising up, and up in fascinated horror to the regular field of - presumably - butt hair all over his head ... :laugh:
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
Yes. They look like the doll from Toy Story.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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While reading this book, Amazon.com: The Expert Beginner eBook: Erik Dietrich: Kindle Store[^] I stumbled upon this...
Quote:
Expert Beginner's are developers who do not understand enough of the big picture to understand that they aren't actually experts. What I mean by this is that they have a narrow enough perspective to think that whatever they have been exposed to is the best and only way to do things. Examples include a C# developer who pooh-poohs Java without ever having tried it or a MySQL DBA who dismisses the NoSQL movement as a passing fad.
I've never seen this explained so well before. I finally know the term (Expert Beginner) to use for the contractor I worked with at a large mortgage bank who knew that he knew everything. This guy had convinced a publisher to publish his book so he basically threw it on my manager's desk and my manager hired him. It was proof enough that he was a genius. At one point I asked the contractor a question about his XML parsing code that he had written as part of a larger project. Me: I see you seem to have written some functionality that manipulates the XML. Why didn't you just use the XML classes built into .NET? ExpertDev:I tried those classes but they weren't any good so I wrote my own. Me <slowly>: Umm... First of all, you've now created proprietary code that everyone throughout the company has to examine and understand just to interact with your section of code now. That's one problem. ExpertDev: Well, I'm telling you the Microsoft libraries are 5 times slower than my code. Me: So you're telling me that you wrote better code than the .NET team at Microsoft? ExpertDev: All I can tell you is that mine parses the XML 5 times faster. I have performance data. Me: Yes, you're right. It is 5 times faster than the .NET XML DOM parser. That's because the .NET one parses it into a structured object that is easy to manipulate. The problem is that in
To be fair some of the Microsoft classes can be difficult to use. After a few months battling my way through problem with the configuration classes, I really regretted my decision to use those MS classes. In future, I might roll my own or find an alternative. My point being, is that we all will have bad experiences that influence our future decisions. In time, you may forget what those reasons were and just stick to the libraries and patterns you're familiar with. Arguing over performance was the wrong argument to have. You should have really dug into the statement 'weren't any good.
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Chris Maunder wrote:
The problem is the manager.
Nailed it!! Very astute of you. You noticed the subtext of the story. I actually told the manager that it was crazy because of all the reasons you mentioned and he said,
Quote:
"[Contractor] is smart enough that I'm sure he is doing the right thing."
X|
-
Chris Maunder wrote:
The problem is the manager.
Nailed it!! Very astute of you. You noticed the subtext of the story. I actually told the manager that it was crazy because of all the reasons you mentioned and he said,
Quote:
"[Contractor] is smart enough that I'm sure he is doing the right thing."
X|
-
raddevus wrote:
"[Contractor] is smart enough that I'm sure he is doing the right thing."
In Manager speak - "I'ts costing me a fortune for this guy, don't tell me he's no good'
The manager was also saying: "Look, it doesn't really matter, because by the time anyone finds out that it's not great code it won't matter because then those people will just have to deal with it anyways. But, if you make noise, upper level management will think something is wrong in my group and then they might start looking more closely at me and my life is good right now. And that's what matters...my life being easy."
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This was a long time ago, before the internet and smartphones. But probably something like this: 1990's INFOMERCIAL HELL #19: Spray paint the bald away with GLH, by Ronco, of course! [^]
"...But the BABES are back!!" lol. That is one seriously awesome commercial. Thank you.
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While reading this book, Amazon.com: The Expert Beginner eBook: Erik Dietrich: Kindle Store[^] I stumbled upon this...
Quote:
Expert Beginner's are developers who do not understand enough of the big picture to understand that they aren't actually experts. What I mean by this is that they have a narrow enough perspective to think that whatever they have been exposed to is the best and only way to do things. Examples include a C# developer who pooh-poohs Java without ever having tried it or a MySQL DBA who dismisses the NoSQL movement as a passing fad.
I've never seen this explained so well before. I finally know the term (Expert Beginner) to use for the contractor I worked with at a large mortgage bank who knew that he knew everything. This guy had convinced a publisher to publish his book so he basically threw it on my manager's desk and my manager hired him. It was proof enough that he was a genius. At one point I asked the contractor a question about his XML parsing code that he had written as part of a larger project. Me: I see you seem to have written some functionality that manipulates the XML. Why didn't you just use the XML classes built into .NET? ExpertDev:I tried those classes but they weren't any good so I wrote my own. Me <slowly>: Umm... First of all, you've now created proprietary code that everyone throughout the company has to examine and understand just to interact with your section of code now. That's one problem. ExpertDev: Well, I'm telling you the Microsoft libraries are 5 times slower than my code. Me: So you're telling me that you wrote better code than the .NET team at Microsoft? ExpertDev: All I can tell you is that mine parses the XML 5 times faster. I have performance data. Me: Yes, you're right. It is 5 times faster than the .NET XML DOM parser. That's because the .NET one parses it into a structured object that is easy to manipulate. The problem is that in
True story... When I was a system engineer with Sperry-UNIVAC back in the day, one of the account reps told us a story about an IT manager that he swore was true. A client IT director was complaining about the slowness of printing reports from one of our small mainframe machines. As most of these directors did not want to spend the monies to upgrade to the far faster printers, this particular account rep suggested that the director put the disk drive units on their third floor, the mainframe unit on the second and the printer on the first. This way the electrons would be going down and as a result, much faster to the printer. About a month later when the account rep visited the account for a regular checkup-call he found the director immersed in blue-prints for the reconstruction of the IT department. Asked what the director was doing he told the account rep that he had gotten permission to start rebuilding the IT areas to implement the account rep's previous month's suggestion for faster printing... Our profession is just littered with stories of such stupidity, which are more often than not completely true. The reason for this is that the quality of technical management in our field tends to be quite low despite all the hype about how they consistently try to hire the best and brightest. In short, most such management are irrational, incompetents who barely have the ability to reason beyond what the company expects of them. They in turn hire buffoons who the original poster of this thread described. Rational, technical personnel who understand this perpetuation of irrationality in our field slowly go insane over the many years we attempt to deal with such people in during our career. It is no wonder that our profession is such a mess?
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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True story... When I was a system engineer with Sperry-UNIVAC back in the day, one of the account reps told us a story about an IT manager that he swore was true. A client IT director was complaining about the slowness of printing reports from one of our small mainframe machines. As most of these directors did not want to spend the monies to upgrade to the far faster printers, this particular account rep suggested that the director put the disk drive units on their third floor, the mainframe unit on the second and the printer on the first. This way the electrons would be going down and as a result, much faster to the printer. About a month later when the account rep visited the account for a regular checkup-call he found the director immersed in blue-prints for the reconstruction of the IT department. Asked what the director was doing he told the account rep that he had gotten permission to start rebuilding the IT areas to implement the account rep's previous month's suggestion for faster printing... Our profession is just littered with stories of such stupidity, which are more often than not completely true. The reason for this is that the quality of technical management in our field tends to be quite low despite all the hype about how they consistently try to hire the best and brightest. In short, most such management are irrational, incompetents who barely have the ability to reason beyond what the company expects of them. They in turn hire buffoons who the original poster of this thread described. Rational, technical personnel who understand this perpetuation of irrationality in our field slowly go insane over the many years we attempt to deal with such people in during our career. It is no wonder that our profession is such a mess?
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
WOW. Just WOW.
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This was a long time ago, before the internet and smartphones. But probably something like this: 1990's INFOMERCIAL HELL #19: Spray paint the bald away with GLH, by Ronco, of course! [^]
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True story... When I was a system engineer with Sperry-UNIVAC back in the day, one of the account reps told us a story about an IT manager that he swore was true. A client IT director was complaining about the slowness of printing reports from one of our small mainframe machines. As most of these directors did not want to spend the monies to upgrade to the far faster printers, this particular account rep suggested that the director put the disk drive units on their third floor, the mainframe unit on the second and the printer on the first. This way the electrons would be going down and as a result, much faster to the printer. About a month later when the account rep visited the account for a regular checkup-call he found the director immersed in blue-prints for the reconstruction of the IT department. Asked what the director was doing he told the account rep that he had gotten permission to start rebuilding the IT areas to implement the account rep's previous month's suggestion for faster printing... Our profession is just littered with stories of such stupidity, which are more often than not completely true. The reason for this is that the quality of technical management in our field tends to be quite low despite all the hype about how they consistently try to hire the best and brightest. In short, most such management are irrational, incompetents who barely have the ability to reason beyond what the company expects of them. They in turn hire buffoons who the original poster of this thread described. Rational, technical personnel who understand this perpetuation of irrationality in our field slowly go insane over the many years we attempt to deal with such people in during our career. It is no wonder that our profession is such a mess?
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
Steve Naidamast wrote:
This way the electrons would be going down and as a result, much faster to the printer.
:wtf: Totally speechless on that one! I've seen a lot of stupidity over the 25 years of my career, but that one is epic. Great story and a fantastic summary of the IT industry (at least 90%), unfortunately.
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While reading this book, Amazon.com: The Expert Beginner eBook: Erik Dietrich: Kindle Store[^] I stumbled upon this...
Quote:
Expert Beginner's are developers who do not understand enough of the big picture to understand that they aren't actually experts. What I mean by this is that they have a narrow enough perspective to think that whatever they have been exposed to is the best and only way to do things. Examples include a C# developer who pooh-poohs Java without ever having tried it or a MySQL DBA who dismisses the NoSQL movement as a passing fad.
I've never seen this explained so well before. I finally know the term (Expert Beginner) to use for the contractor I worked with at a large mortgage bank who knew that he knew everything. This guy had convinced a publisher to publish his book so he basically threw it on my manager's desk and my manager hired him. It was proof enough that he was a genius. At one point I asked the contractor a question about his XML parsing code that he had written as part of a larger project. Me: I see you seem to have written some functionality that manipulates the XML. Why didn't you just use the XML classes built into .NET? ExpertDev:I tried those classes but they weren't any good so I wrote my own. Me <slowly>: Umm... First of all, you've now created proprietary code that everyone throughout the company has to examine and understand just to interact with your section of code now. That's one problem. ExpertDev: Well, I'm telling you the Microsoft libraries are 5 times slower than my code. Me: So you're telling me that you wrote better code than the .NET team at Microsoft? ExpertDev: All I can tell you is that mine parses the XML 5 times faster. I have performance data. Me: Yes, you're right. It is 5 times faster than the .NET XML DOM parser. That's because the .NET one parses it into a structured object that is easy to manipulate. The problem is that in
His blog is pretty awesome, too. www.daedtech.com
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Steve Naidamast wrote:
This way the electrons would be going down and as a result, much faster to the printer.
:wtf: Totally speechless on that one! I've seen a lot of stupidity over the 25 years of my career, but that one is epic. Great story and a fantastic summary of the IT industry (at least 90%), unfortunately.
I will never forget the expression of the account rep's face when he told us that story. He said the day that he went into that company and found out what was going on he was incredulous to the point of shock that someone could be so stupid as to actually believe what he had told them...
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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His blog is pretty awesome, too. www.daedtech.com
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While reading this book, Amazon.com: The Expert Beginner eBook: Erik Dietrich: Kindle Store[^] I stumbled upon this...
Quote:
Expert Beginner's are developers who do not understand enough of the big picture to understand that they aren't actually experts. What I mean by this is that they have a narrow enough perspective to think that whatever they have been exposed to is the best and only way to do things. Examples include a C# developer who pooh-poohs Java without ever having tried it or a MySQL DBA who dismisses the NoSQL movement as a passing fad.
I've never seen this explained so well before. I finally know the term (Expert Beginner) to use for the contractor I worked with at a large mortgage bank who knew that he knew everything. This guy had convinced a publisher to publish his book so he basically threw it on my manager's desk and my manager hired him. It was proof enough that he was a genius. At one point I asked the contractor a question about his XML parsing code that he had written as part of a larger project. Me: I see you seem to have written some functionality that manipulates the XML. Why didn't you just use the XML classes built into .NET? ExpertDev:I tried those classes but they weren't any good so I wrote my own. Me <slowly>: Umm... First of all, you've now created proprietary code that everyone throughout the company has to examine and understand just to interact with your section of code now. That's one problem. ExpertDev: Well, I'm telling you the Microsoft libraries are 5 times slower than my code. Me: So you're telling me that you wrote better code than the .NET team at Microsoft? ExpertDev: All I can tell you is that mine parses the XML 5 times faster. I have performance data. Me: Yes, you're right. It is 5 times faster than the .NET XML DOM parser. That's because the .NET one parses it into a structured object that is easy to manipulate. The problem is that in
I think what you describe here can be hypothetically (partially) explained by the "Dunning-Kruger" research: [^]; however, I suspect there are other dimensions to the dynamic of your interactions, as well, such as: maintenance of "face" by the nominally senior role-holder who feels challenged by you, technically. Without more information on context, like where, when, public/private, who else was present, etc., useless to speculate more. cheers, Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
