Pragmatic Thinking Learning: A Journey From Novice To Expert — Dreyfus At Work: Herding Racehorses And Racing Sheep

Hiraq Citra M
lifefunk
Published in
3 min readJun 19, 2023

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Source: https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Thinking-Learning-Refactor-Programmers/dp/1934356050

Table of Contents

About Series
The Summary
The Sad Fact of Skill Distribution
The Mind Map
Outro

About Series

This story is the third part of the series of Chapter 2: Journey From Novice To Expert.

The Summary

Experts aren’t perfect

They can make mistakes just like anyone else, they are subject to the same cognitive and other biases. They will also likely disagree with one another on topics within their field.

By misunderstanding the Dreyfus model, we can rob them of their expertise. It’s actually easy to derail an expert and ruin their performance. All you have to do is force them to follow the rules.

Rules ruin experts

This has ramifications for teamwork as well. Consider any development methodology or corporate culture that dictates iron-clad rules. What impact will that have on the experts in the team? It will drag their performance down to the level of the novice. You lose all competitive advantage of their expertise

Intuition is the tool of the expert in all fields, but organizations tend to discount it because they mistakenly feel that intuition “isn’t scientific” or “isn’t repeatable”. So, we tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater and don’t listen to the experts to whom we pay so much.

We also tend to take novices and throw them in the deep end of the development pool — far over their heads. They need to be “herded”, that is, given unambiguous direction, quick successes, and so on.

Use rules for novices, intuition for experts

The Sad Fact of Skill Distribution

Most people are advance beginners

Metacognitive abilities, or the ability of being self — aware, tends to be possible only at the higher levels.

  • Unfortunately, this means practitioners at the lower skill levels have a marked tendency to overestimate their own abilities — by as much as 50 percent, as it turns out
  • The only path to a more self — assessment is to improve the individual’s skill level, which in turn increases metacognitive ability

Second-order-incompetence, not knowing just how much it is that you don’t know. The beginner is confident despite the odds; the expert will be far more cautious when the going gets weird. Experts will show much more self-doubt.

Know what you don’t know

Expert != Teacher

Experts aren’t always the best teachers. Teaching is an expertise in its own right; just because you are expert in some subject is no guarantee that you can teach it to others.

You may find that someone at a competent level might be in better position to teach a novice than an expert would be

When pairing or mentoring within the team, you might try using mentors who are closer in skill level to the trainee

The hallmark of the expert is their use of intuition and the ability to recognize patterns in context.

Intuition and pattern matching replace explicit knowledge

Ten Years to Expertise?

So you want to be an expert? You need to budget about ten years of effort, regardless of the subject area. Researchers have studied, many professions. In virtually every case, from Mozart to Beatles, you find evidence of minimum of a decade of hard work before world-class expertise shows up

The Mind Map

Outro

For me, the interesting part of this chapter is:

Rules ruin experts

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