The 20/10 confidence scale: the necessary thing for building great career or dream team
There are things people tend to think they are good at. Though sometimes it’s true, the most interesting part of that is about things we are lying to ourselves about.
Wait, wait, wait! Who is lying, you just said that I am lying?
Yeah, I know how it may appear: you come across an article of a random guy, which starts with an accusation in the first sentences. Yes, that’s what it is, and it’s absolutely necessary! Just stay with me for a few sentences more — and you will see why ;)
Here are two situations (just 2 sides of the barricade):
- You’ve started learning something, and in short time you feel like you are so much cooler than you used to be. Moreover, you are so much cooler than others. Yes, you’ve got it — a superpower of learning things fastly. Yay!
- You’re interviewing a new person for an open position in your team. He sounds so confident about his experience and skills that you immediately consider him a real professional. Then, you get a bit deeper and ask him to solve a generic task, but he can’t handle it.`
I am not sure….
Ok, here is the thing — you may think about yourself as an extremely objective person, but that might be a trap too. Later, I will introduce you to a few guys who have studied a lot games our mind plays with us — I bet you will be surprised (unless you’ve already heard of it).
So either you can clearly see yourself in one of those situation from above or you strongly believe it’s not about you — I suggest getting familiar with what I am going to tell you here. Here are some things you will find in this article:
- why lying to yourself about your skills interfere with your career
- how to stop confusing yourself and finally get “that” job (aren’t you worth it, huh?)
- how to recognize whether others are telling you truth about their skills (even if you don’t think you need it now, just believe me — it’s a true power!)
- how make it clearer for yourself and others what you want to achieve (you don’t see the connection now, right? just hold on for a bit — and I’ll show you)
So what about those 2 smart ones?
Yes! Let me introduce you David Dunning and Justin Kruger (if you know who they are and what they did — you can continue reading from the next section — a lot of interesting there!). These two put all this thing with self-overestimation into a nice scientific wrapper, which is called now Dunning-Kruger effect. Again, let’s picture it in a real-world situation.
Imagine you are interviewing someone for the position of a full-stack developer. You ask him to evaluate his Javascript skills from 0 to 10. He comes up with the number “8”, but when you ask him to solve a simple problem, he fails to do it.
Well-well, the number “8” is something that you would rarely want to take as it is. Why? Because those who do know the topic at this level, would likely underestimate their skills, and (again) those who can hardly reach 5 would likely overestimate them.
On the image from above you can see a nice visualization of Dunning-Kruger “in action”. Loosely speaking, people who tend to overestimate themselves as specialists lack the whole picture (which itself comes with the competence) to see how incompetent they are.
All too often, this happens to the beginners that have gained basic understanding. In the IT field, it seems to be especially relevant — just think of how many self-taught people are in the field!
Ok, fine, but how can I use it in practice?
This is the question I asked myself! It’s the time for a small mind exercise :)
No, don’t be afraid we are not going to solve mathematical equations — instead, we will play around with the graph of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Getting back to the graph again: perhaps, we can make more sense of it if we put some points. Let’s count 10 units at the “confidence” axis. Now, what if we draw the line through the 5th one? Let’s see!
Hmmm, what should I see now?
Haha, yeah, we all have been there! The only fact of visualization doesn’t mean that you should immediately understand what is going on there. No worries, I will explain you what we are looking for.
Let me take you back to the way we usually assess each other’s skills. From 0 to 10, right? But haven’t we all experienced how limited this approach is? When you feel like you are doing great despite being a beginner, your ego might not allow you assess your skills with the mark of less than 5. However, if you had a bigger scale of 20 points, there might be more possibilities to assess yourself in more realistic way.
Wait, is it just an issue of a scale?
That’s a good question! Of course, it’s not just about scale. I believe it’s more about putting critical points on your own scale of growth and being able to rationalize the marks you assign to yourself. And that’s why we needed to explore the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Yes, everything is coming together! Now, if you plot your 20 points at the Dunning-Kruger’s effect graph, you can see that it makes a lot more sense. Also, it becomes obvious why it is so difficult to fit the whole self-assessment into usual 10 points.
Ok, magic! What does that mean? To be concrete, just recall a subject which you know good from your professional or educational life. What is it, just for example? Than pay attention to points 8 and 10. If you never felt the pain about something’s complexity (points 9–10), and you quite confident in it, that highly likely you are just a beginner (ok, ok, The Genius), and you should use numbers 0–8. If you know that there was a time when you were really confident about something, but now not you are not so confident at all, then you are in points 9–10, which is the measure of your despair. Don’t worry, it will be much better soon. If you feel that you a quite professional, but you have a lack of knowledge, that just add 10 to your intuitive “out of 10” assess, and you’ll get a number from 10 to 20, and it will be you real professionality estimate on that scale. Easy!
Therefore, I propose to use the approach of 20/10 while evaluating own skills or someone else’s skills. To make it clear, let’s consider that you are applying for a job position, and the interviewer is asking you to give an evaluation of your skills. In response to the latter, you can say something like: “9 on the scale of confidence 20 out of 10”. Also, I won’t have anything against if you say: “on the scale of SDK (Sergienko-Dunning-Kruger)”. Explain the Dunning-Kruger effect — and believe me, you will sound impressive!
No, it’s not just that!
I believe that every person contains 50% of what he is now and 50% of what he wants to become, which means that if you can show what your aim is, you have a higher possibility to be fairly evaluated. Let’s see how you can use “20/10” for this.
If you want to show that you are a beginner in Python but want to become a professional, you can mark it as “3–>15”. Or you can show that you’re not interested in growing your skills in a particular area in the following way:
“11–>11”. For example, here’s how I mapped my skills:
- Frontend development: 13 –> 14
- Backend development: 13 –> 14
- Software Architect: 11 –> 15
- Software Testing: 11 –> 13
- Management: 9 –> 20
- Startup development: 9 –> 20
- Entrepreneurship: 7 –> 20
- Marketing: 4 –> 15
What about others?
Of course, we have been talking mostly about self-evaluation. Let’s consider a scenario where you want to hire a new developer. So during a job interview, the candidate says that his skills in the field are 5 out of 10. Here are some steps you can do to figure out the truth:
- collate what he says with his experience in years
- find out what kind of problems he has faced and solved
- ask him tricky questions
- give him something to solve
If you rely on the approach of 20/10 and Dunning-Kruger effect, you will find it easier to ask proper questions. Also, you can tell the candidate about this approach and ask him to evaluate himself accordingly. It will ease the process of evaluation and give you a ground for collaboration with the potential employee.
Take care of your careers! Wish you to succeed in becoming a professional in 5 years (or any time you find suitable). And, of course, don’t hesitate to comment if you have any questions and/or suggestions.
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