When I was younger I was
"an arrogant know-it-all prick" at one point in the "middle years" of my programming experience, as many of you know from the stories I often relate on this weblog.
The phrase "middle years" doesn't give us a frame of reference for my age though. For instance, if I were 50 years old right now, my "middle years" of programming may have been when I was in my thirties. That's not the case, and I want to give you that frame of reference: I'm 28 at the time of this writing. The middle years as I talked about them would have referred to my late teens to early twenties. Maybe even up to the the middle of my twenties.
By most standards, that's young.
And I know a thing or two about being set in your ways. We can all see the laugh I have at myself with the title here being "My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder" and some of the stories I've told as well.
In fact, let me add to the wealth of stodginess, idiocy, and all around opposite-of-good-
developerness here:
I once said I preferred Windows to Linux. While that's not a completely shocking statement, the reason behind it was: I said I preferred Windows because 14 year olds work on Linux. Not because of any experience I'd had with it, but because of
my fear of learning it.
Like with operating systems,
your ignorance does not make a programming language suck. Although I've been tempted to say .NET sucks because of my early troubles with it, I've refrained,
admitted my ignorance, and asked for help removing it.
Because of my prior experience being unwilling to learn, I was quite interested when I read this:
When you are young, you don't have that sense of self to protect. You're driven by a need to find out who you are, to turn the pages of your biography and see how the story turns out. If people around you are doing something you don't understand, you assume the problem is your inexperience and you go to work trying to understand it.
But when you are old, when you know who you are, everything is different. When people around you are doing something you don't understand, you have no trouble at all explaining why they are assholes mistaken.
. . .
If you want a new idea, you have to silence your inner critic. Your sense of right and wrong, of smart and stupid works by comparing new ideas to what you already know. Your sense of what would be a good fit for you works by comparing new things to who you already are. To learn and grow, you must let go of you, you must be young again, you must accept that you don't understand and seek to understand rather than explaining why it doesn't make any sense.
In a couple of paragraphs, Reg sums up
almost precisely some of what I've been thinking and writing about for the last several months. He's
so close, but misses a fundamental point: the old and young parts are incidental.
My hypothesis is that
the level of learning and idea absorption you can attain has little to do with age. Instead, it is influenced more by your perceived level of experience. Normally, age is highly correlated to experience - but it doesn't have to be. In my case, when I was younger I thought I knew everything. Now that I've aged, I came to the realization I know very little.
My conclusion is not that different from Reg's, and this is not some scientific experimental contest, so let me explain why I feel the difference is worth noting: If we blame our reluctance to try new things on age, we are dooming ourselves to think of it as some unchangeable, deterministic process. By thinking of it in terms of perception of experience, we admit to being able to control it with more ease. (My belief is that we have control over what and how we perceive things.)
In other words, we lose our ability to blame anyone but ourselves. That's a powerful motivator sometimes.
Thoughts? Disagreements? Please be kind enough to let me know.
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I do agree that perceived level of experience makes one less able to learn from others. However, I also note a culture (geographical) attitude toward learning. It seems to me that Asians are more prone to blaming themselves for failures. From my observation, when an Asian student fails a class, he/she is more likely to blame him/herself instead of the teacher. It could be that I haven't met enough people ^_^.
I believe that all computer languages suck (if we compare it to human languages). How much they suck comparing to each other is a different issue.
Posted by Dat Chu
on Apr 28, 2008 at 09:48 AM UTC - 5 hrs
I'd reword this slightly, replacing "perceived level of experience" with "level of arrogance". I'm saying the same thing, but using slightly different language as there is nothing wrong with knowing everything about a topic (being highly experienced). This issue is when you *think* you know everything about a topic and you close yourself to learning.
It seems to me this was what you were getting at with "perceived level of experience, but for me, arrogance captures it more concisely. Knowing everything about something is just being smart. Believing you know everything about something (even if you do) is plain arrogance.
I love when I see comments by people like Ron Jeffries on the XP lists. He certainly comes across as someone who still has a beginners mind, while also having lots of experience.
Posted by
Peter Bell
on Apr 28, 2008 at 10:54 AM UTC - 5 hrs
"The level of learning and idea absorption you can attain has little to do with age. Instead, it is influenced more by your perceived level of experience." I like this! Way better than the usual "old dogs can't learn new tricks". Self-image is surely the enemy of learning more than old neurons are.
Do you know of any research on this? I know from doing improv that anything that tricks you out of your self-image can pretty well instantly open you to look at and experience things in new ways, and have completely new reactions. I'm curious what controlled studies have revealed, though, about how much previously established patterns block you, and what techniques can mitigate or undo that.
Posted by
Ben Kovitz
on Apr 28, 2008 at 01:58 PM UTC - 5 hrs
@Dat Chu - I've read about the difference between how Asian (also Russian, IIRC) and westerners raise / teach their children to view learning. In essence, (and in general) Asians tend to emphasize work ethic, while westerners emphasize "smarts." So, when an Asian child does something well, they might receive praise like "you worked very hard, and you prevailed," while a westerner might get praise like "look what you did, you're so smart!"
This difference leads to Asian children who believe if they work hard enough, they can master anything, while their western counterparts believe if they don't understand something, they just aren't smart enough. Of course, this results in the western students giving up while eastern will persevere.
I hope I explained that well - it was something I read a while back which made a lot of sense. Wish I had a source. Anyway, I was lucky enough to be raised in the more eastern tradition. =)
Posted by
Sammy Larbi
on Apr 28, 2008 at 06:25 PM UTC - 5 hrs
@Dat: Regarding the comment above, of course if your experience has been different, please correct me and call BS!
@Peter Bell: I agree. I think "arrogance" reads better than what I said, and I felt "perceived level of experience" sounded awkward. Arrogance is closer to what I was trying to say, but I still don't think it's the right word. It would be hard to characterize experience and confidence in that experience as arrogance, even if the confidence /is/ misplaced. Though "arrogance" is an improvement, I'd like to find an even better word.
@Ben Kovitz: I wish I did have research - I'd love to read some more about it too. Sadly, all I have is my observation of myself, which hardly qualifies as scientific, though it may approach objectivity in some manner.
I'm fascinated by things like that, and when I finish school I intend to read more about personality, psychology, and behavior as time allows.
If you find anything, please keep me updated!
Posted by
Sammy Larbi
on Apr 28, 2008 at 06:32 PM UTC - 5 hrs
Reading this reminded me of something Pete Bell posted yesterday to a CF mailing list, talking about hiring developers. I thought it was a great quote, and is at least slightly relevant to your post:
"In either it wouldn't be how many years experience, but how much experience they'd built up in their years."
Posted by duncan
on Apr 29, 2008 at 03:26 AM UTC - 5 hrs
Duncan - thanks for bringing that up. It reminds me of another way of putting it: "Do you have X years of experience, or one year of experience X times?"
Posted by
Sammy Larbi
on Apr 29, 2008 at 06:05 AM UTC - 5 hrs
@Sam, yep - that was the inspiration, but I thought I'd take creative license this time!
Posted by
Peter Bell
on Apr 29, 2008 at 06:32 AM UTC - 5 hrs
This is why I think it is so important to find a team to work on where the people are better than you. People with more experience and expertise can unveil your arrogance with a handclap, like a Tibetan yogi would with a student. But if you're working alone or are the (god-forbid) lead architect, then you'll only be able to see your own arrogance after years of hindsight and reflection.
We all do things the wrong way (steady advancement in industry wide best practices assures this). Learning is seeing these mistakes and changing. Left to our own devices, it will take years and months to discover our own mistakes. A good team will discover them before you submit to version control.
Posted by
Hamlet D'Arcy
on Apr 29, 2008 at 07:28 AM UTC - 5 hrs
>>> the level of learning and idea absorption you can attain has little to do with age. Instead, it is influenced more by your perceived level of experience.
--------------
Very astute observation. I know a guy that thinks he knows (most) all there is to know about subject X (Like I did a number of years ago ;) ).
He is blissfully (and literally) unaware of how little he knows. Yet speaks with the authority of a Master.
The older you get the more relevant this phrase becomes:
"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." - Will Durant
Posted by Gerald Guido
on Apr 29, 2008 at 11:21 AM UTC - 5 hrs
Born in '51. I have some success at silencing the inner critic utilizing variations of "this will be the *last* language I will have to learn." Inner critic knows, by now, that I'm an inveterate liar -- but Inner critic is a hopeless romantic who always thinks "this time it will be different."
And so we go. Currently Ruby, accompanied by conversational Actionscript and, if Google has her way, soon re-learning Python, again.
Posted by Matt Platte
on Apr 29, 2008 at 11:31 AM UTC - 5 hrs
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