<story><title>How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2013)</title><url>http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eranation</author><text>If you work in an average company who hires average people and you are well above average you quickly risk becoming exactly that. You can be the top 5% (I know it&amp;#x27;s subjective and controversial yet I&amp;#x27;m sure we all have a clue what that means) of developers and this will make it likely for you to be that &amp;quot;local maximum&amp;quot; as everyone will see you internally as a guru.&lt;p&gt;But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won&amp;#x27;t even make the first round of phone screens.&lt;p&gt;Get out of your comfort zone, and simply learn something new. Go wide, go deep or go both just realize that the moment you feel you are an expert on something it just means you are probably just ready to start learning it for real.&lt;p&gt;tl;dr 
Knowing more than your peers doesn&amp;#x27;t make you an expert. You are at a local maximum and you need to look at the big picture to avoid being stuck there forever</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devonkim</author><text>Can&amp;#x27;t upvote this enough.&lt;p&gt;It is very important to recognize that &amp;quot;comfort zone&amp;quot; also means you must have room to fail, which is actually tough for companies to hire for because most companies are actually super risk averse when it comes to hiring. Why else would they want to hire people that know as much about their stack as a filter before asking questions about their &lt;i&gt;potential&lt;/i&gt;?&lt;p&gt;I went (foolishly, in hindsight) into areas on the thesis that a lot of organizations simply need some motivation from one or two highly capable people to raise the standards for everyone and that this form of leadership would be a good career path because people are oftentimes rewarded quite well for saving failing &amp;#x2F; ailing companies. Instead, I was beaten severely for trying to do create too much change for people that just wanted to a 9-to-5 job or (more importantly) given no projects with any risk or even much value even if it succeeded.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve come to realize that organizations without risk or without any sense of leaving their comfort zones are the same thing as &lt;i&gt;people&lt;/i&gt; - these are beginner-expert organizations. These are companies who implement a working Hadoop cluster in production and give themselves a big pat on the back... in 2015. These are companies that implement some CMDB... in 2014. These are companies that are rolling out SOAP services seriously on a roadmap... for 2018. The aversion to risk leads inevitably to worse results than if you had accepted some failures, but this only makes sense anyway when your organization is capable of speed. And this becomes the ultimate chicken and the egg problem with large companies. My answer is that you must break your egg to create a new chicken - if you do not sacrifice something, you will lose everything for sure.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2013)</title><url>http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eranation</author><text>If you work in an average company who hires average people and you are well above average you quickly risk becoming exactly that. You can be the top 5% (I know it&amp;#x27;s subjective and controversial yet I&amp;#x27;m sure we all have a clue what that means) of developers and this will make it likely for you to be that &amp;quot;local maximum&amp;quot; as everyone will see you internally as a guru.&lt;p&gt;But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won&amp;#x27;t even make the first round of phone screens.&lt;p&gt;Get out of your comfort zone, and simply learn something new. Go wide, go deep or go both just realize that the moment you feel you are an expert on something it just means you are probably just ready to start learning it for real.&lt;p&gt;tl;dr 
Knowing more than your peers doesn&amp;#x27;t make you an expert. You are at a local maximum and you need to look at the big picture to avoid being stuck there forever</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kdamken</author><text>This is very true and so important to your professional growth. There&amp;#x27;s a famous saying, &amp;quot;if you&amp;#x27;re the best one in the room, you&amp;#x27;re in the wrong room&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;At my last job I was the only developer at a small web agency, along with a designer and a project manager. Basically every problem and solution I had to figure out myself, and while I did that, due to time constraints I often had to go with just what worked, rather than figuring out the best of all possible options.&lt;p&gt;At my current job, there are developers who know a lot more than me, and in the time I&amp;#x27;ve spent working with them I&amp;#x27;ve found I learn so much more so much more quickly than I did when I was working on my own.</text></comment>