On Experience

We are simply unable to think about […] text passages at a different competency level than the one we currently possess. Once you become an expert, recreating the novice state of mind turns out to be very hard, if not impossible. […] Instead of simply projecting our past selves back to our students, we should take on board the fact that our training has deeply changed us. (You can’t unlearn, and that’s a challenge for teachers, Alexander Jeuk, Valentina Petrolini)

Skill

Learning a skill changes us in such a way that we can no longer see the world without it. Imagine, for example, not being able to read this text. Chances are you won’t be able to. As soon as you see these words, your brain has read them before you can think. We can’t separate ourselves from a skill we’ve learned. Once internalized, it becomes the new normal. It is obvious now, and we’re unaware of it in our daily life.

This pattern shows up everywhere, all the time, in our software engineering teams. A career in this field means learning and practicing approaches to problems. Developing a product is a continuous process of learning and discovery in which we refine countless skills, be they foundational or arbitrary. Helpful or misleading later on. Generally applicable or specific to an organization.

But learning is progress, how can that be a problem? I wasn’t aware of being able to walk when I picked up my kids from school today. How is that an issue? If I’m building a school for other people, it might be. If I don’t, all is well. If I’m planning anything in software engineering involving other people, human behaviour around skill acquisition matters because learning is what we do all day.

Blindspots

What happens when we meet someone who is not able to do something that is obvious to us? We might be surprised for a second, perhaps taken aback. Why can’t you just, we ask. We tend to assume that others perceive the world as we do. What is obvious to us seems normal, and should be so for everyone, shouldn’t it? We can even lose it when someone repeatedly fails to do what seems natural to us. And as soon as stress kicks in, patience goes out the window quick.

Job interviewers might ask a question the answer to which they themselves have only come across in the past few months. They may not be aware of this. What they have learned is still fresh in their memory but already seems obvious enough. Now, a similar signal is expected from the candidate. We can be quite nonchalant about things we didn’t know ourselves until recently.

After one year, a team of software developers can’t reliably assess how intricate its codebase is. Month after month its members have gotten used to new levels of insight over the course of their shared learning history. It’s only when someone new is joining that we remember what skills are required to understand all of this – or to consider it normal. That is, if we take them seriously. If we empathize with them. Just as we can’t abstract from our own reading skills, we can’t keep our codebase comprehensible by imagining other people who don’t know what we know. We need them to tell us, and we need to listen.

We underestimate onboarding because we don’t remember our own learning efforts apart from anecdotes. It took us a lot longer than we think. This is a serious problem when planning future activities, for example a rewrite of a piece of software. It impacts our ability to evaluate others, and to put our own daily practice into perspective. If it took a lot of learning to build a product, it might take some teaching to keep it alive. Do you know how much?

Experience

As soon as you have explored a layer [or skill, PJ] you mechanize it, it becomes automated and people are no longer conscious of what they’re doing they just do it. They don’t pay attention anymore." (The Ghost in the Machine, Joscha Bach)

If experience is the sum of our skills, it is also the sum of our blindspots. We do a whole bunch of stuff we’re no longer conscious of. That can make us effective and valuable, no question. But we don’t know anymore why we see things the way we do. We idealize and rationalize when trying to remember. There is a fair amount of storytelling because we can’t tell ourselves and our experience apart.

It’s easy to let experience seduce us into believing that our first instinct is always right. That’s when we lose our touch. What to do? I don’t have a simple recipe. Maybe the more experienced we get, the more we actively have to seek out being wrong? Stop it with the monologues and lean onto questions and conversations to keep us on our toes? Listen to others for a bit longer than judgement and nerves might allow?

Are we really going to do that? We’ll have to slow down when we could just go ahead and get it over with. Cultivating an innate interest in others and their views helps. Keeping in mind that other people is just another expression for the world around us. We should stay in touch with it. If we make plans for others, it’s important what they believe or might discover to be obvious, not what we do. We’re allowed to help, though.

January, 2024