So why is this a big deal...?
The topology of Wisdom and Confidence
First of all, let's recap the central ideas of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Sadly, the original article from about 20 years ago is paywalled (grr), but there is plenty of information about it online.
In essence, this effect tells us that, shortly after being total n00bs, we assume we confidently know a hell of a lot about everything. Many people reach that point, and never progress. This is the lofty peak of the so-called Mount Stupid. We do NOT want to build a comfy cabin atop Mount Stupid, and rest on our somewhat windswept laurels.
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| The Dunning-Kruger effect found at https://www.bcs.org/content-hub/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-agile/ |
Unfortunately, after the comfortable lofty heights of Mount Stupid, we descend into the Valley of Despair, where we think we know nothing, will never get anywhere, and probably drown in an intellectual bog or get stuck in motivational quicksand.
However, if we can push through that, we'll reach the Slope of Enlightenment, and, after a likely grueling climb, peek over the edge of the canyon across the Plateau of Sustainability - possibly into a glorious sunset and catching sight of a perfectly chilled beverage waiting for us. Our journey is not yet over, however!
Takehome messages? First, beware of the times when you think you've mastered a topic. You might well be sitting atop Mount Stupid. Secondly, when you're mired in the Valley of Despair, eating the last of your Lembas Bread and covered in muck, know that if you keep pushing you will eventually climb. Thirdly, note that there is a plateau of sustainability - the learning cannot, and should not, stop; it keeps on going. You may also experience that there are many plateaus of sustainability and valleys of despair in your own path.
For additional insight, realise that this is a landscape, not a linear path - these treacherous peaks spread out in every direction (and dimension) - and you can be at different places in this curve for any skill or knowledge. You might, for example, achieve a top level certification in one narrow discipline, and likely be somewhere on the plateau of sustainability for that, but possibly that sense of expertise may leak across into other areas - where you're only atop Mount Stupid (for example people who think management is easy after mastering technical skills may well be sitting firmly atop Mount Stupid as managers - because they have not learned enough about management to realise where they are).
If you've spoken to people who are highly educated (for example many academics) who take stock of their knowledge, many of them will come to a conclusion that their learning mainly underscores how little they know - not that they have become omniscient cognoscenti. There are three major categories of knowledge - things you know (I know this stuff! "the known"), things you know you don't know (I have a knowledge gap here about this stuff! "the known unknown"), and things you don't know you don't know (I've never even heard of this stuff! "the unknown unknown"). For example, take this blog post, illustrating that what education seems to do is slightly increase the stuff you know, but really underscores what you know you don't know - but still hardly touches on things you don't know you don't know (how can it?)!
The other side to Dunning-Kruger is impostor syndrome (described more than twice as long ago as Dunning-Kruger, in 1978), where you know rather a lot, but either by misunderstanding what you know versus what you perceive others know (and denigrating your own knowledge), or by mentally highlighting all the known unknowns and undermining the value of the known against that. Impostor syndrome might be where you drag the valley of despair far further to the right by underestimating your perceived knowledge and confidence therein, not recognising your successful ascent of the Slope of Enlightenment. It's super common in people who pursue advanced degrees, people who change careers, and under-represented people in the workforce. It's quite hard to separate out the Valley of Despair from deep impostor syndrome, but you may be able to figure out where you are through using external viewpoints (What do your colleagues say about your knowledge or performance in the job? How highly qualified or experienced are you vs. others in your field?). It's probably best not to dwell on this dichotomy too much, but instead use it as an impetus to at least tackle the known unknowns - tracking along that wisdom axis in a positive direction, no matter what.
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| Dunning-Kruger vs Impostor Synrome Found at: https://ardalis.com/the-more-you-know-the-more-you-realize-you-dont-know/ |
In my own journey, inevitably the moment I think I've got somewhere, I take a look down the path and see a whole bunch of new things I've not yet learned, and slip into a more or less profound Valley of Despair for a while. That is both exciting (as someone who actively likes learning) and daunting (as someone who wants to "master" something). I know there are large areas of human knowledge in which I have little interest in developing expertise. There are others I know to defer to experts. I recognise that there are unknown unknowns, and they may blindside me on some idle Tuesday - but for the most part, I find that more knowledge always pays off, and that more learning points out and allows me to selectively fill gaps.
What does this mean for a career in IT, anyway?
Just like the teenager (the classic exemplar of the "knows everything whilst knowing nothing" trope), or the recent (under)graduate, professionals risk falling into the same traps. Think for a moment about your own journeys in technology, or life more broadly. Can you remember a time when you thought you'd basically mastered everything to do with an area of IT - yet if you think about it now, you laugh to yourself, and consider how very deluded Younger You was? There you can see a perfect personal example of sitting astride the summit of Mount Stupid. You may even have some horror stories of the messes you got into from those lofty heights of neophyte over-confidence.
Let's go a step further. Reflect for a moment on how well you think you know a topic. Pick anything, I'll wait...
Right, so where do you think you are on that curve with that topic? Be honest with yourself. Are there actually large areas you've ignored intentionally, or even don't know exist at all? How can you find out? Well, here is an area where qualifications help. If you have a particular qualification (or they exist on that topic), go look at the course content for the next highest level. How well do you think you know that stuff? Is it all new and unknown? Something you only have a vague understanding of? Oh, great, you've already reached the highest level of that programme! Right, go look at a parallel stream, or a similar qualification for another vendor - or a platform or technology you've never played with. Is that certification only an entry level programme? See if there is a higher level one. There are some areas that only a few people on the planet understand, once things get complicated enough. There are some things nobody knows!
If you've not already considered yourself stuck in the Valley of Despair, it's possible that we've just plotted your location on GPS, bang smack in the middle, treacherous ground to all sides, and no way to pick our way back to the old glories at the pinnacle of Mount Stupid. It's disheartening, perhaps, but I think we all ultimately recognise that the summit of Mount Stupid is a bad place to be.
If you're serious about a long term - successful - career, you need to figure out how to keep developing. IT is a particularly vicious field in this regard, because the industry likes to put the goalposts on an ever receding conveyor belt. If you consider the Red Queen of the Alice books, you're running just as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. Stop, and you'll be dumped off the end. Plan it out - set targets, realistic timelines and goals, and how you can get there in the form of a career plan. Make sure you discuss this with partners, as achieving it is likely to significantly eat into time at home, particularly where there is little or no active development at your day job. They may also have to put up with a lab environment in the home, which can be a contentious point! Recognise there is a need to balance career/work and life, and nobody else is going to help you get there - and always remember that "career" can risk undermining some elements of "life".
Any good organisation should recognise this trend, and make sure they develop their staff. Of course, your long term career aspirations and their desires for you in a particular position may not meet 100%. You will need to find a balance between work provided professional development activities, time you spend during working hours extending your knowledge, "leisure" time you devote to study, and all the other things you need to do for "life" in order to achieve that most tenuous and nebulous of goals - work/life balance. If the organisation you're in doesn't provide learning time for you, or actively support learning activities through providing books, equipment to "lab" on, mandatory training or financially supporting elective training you desire (and giving you paid study leave to do it), then this might be a significant downside to working for that employer - this may be bad enough to mean you need to look elsewhere, or something to emphasise in your search for jobs, or during interviews or benefit negotiations.
Realise that as much as you may improve and get better and better at your job, and start to gain knowledge (and even experience) beyond your job description, there is a common trend in many companies that there isn't much internal promotion; either staff turnover is low so they can't promote, or they simply don't provide internal promotions when positions are open, or "grade bumps" or other incentives to retain staff. Modern HR tends to also focus on positions, not people (arguably the very opposite of the first core principle of Agile!); unless the department can prove they need a person in role X, they can't create it just to keep you happy. I've been in meetings where HR people say this out loud as inflexible and absolute policy. Of course, if a department wants to entirely restructure around this, there may be some wiggle-room - but it still means they need to display a need for the role - regardless of who fills it. It also partly explains why job descriptions and the "in the trenches" experiences are often a little different; HR picks and enforces "standard" job templates, but the they don't quite meet reality in a company. This means you inevitably have to "hop" laterally - and slightly upwards - to get to your desired positions, particularly if you have aggressive goals. You will often have to decide whether staying where you are is a good thing or not - and realise that comfort in a particular position may be an analogy to the intellectual Mount Stupid! Your career plan should keep you on track and regularly assessing your own progress toward those goals.
You may also be quite happy to stay in more junior roles, or even not be able to get above a certain level for various reasons - and that is 100% fine, but make sure you give it significant thought and discuss it with your partner; consider potential "career plateaus" that you may not be able to rise above without significant changes. There is a lot of horse-trading in achieving a work-life-progress balance that works for you - and your family. And hey, your ideas or vision may change, that that's also perfectly fine!
Recognise that a career plan in IT itself can't be static - new jobs, roles and even industry sectors appear as if by magic. You'll also change over time. Make sure you spend at least a little time regularly examining major trends and how those are likely to (positively and negatively) affect your career and the organisation(s) you work for - and use those insights to adjust that plan, and the insights, advice or direction you give to your organisation or people you may end up mentoring.
Any time you really think you've mastered a topic, go and hang out with people who know more than you do - either by attending a conference, or joining a high level technical mailing list - either in something you think you're pretty good at or something you're learning. You will rapidly be shown just how little you know about a field, or the day to day intricacies of theory in practice! If you really and truly have reached the end of the route of all knowledge in one track (that's some chutzpah there...), you can either wait 3-5 years and have everything change, or you can start applying your learning skills to a new road of intellectual discovery - or both...
"I don't know, but I know how to find out" might be the ultimate goal in life as a person in a technical field - particularly at the bleeding edge and with a new challenge. Of course, if it's something basic, well, you might feel a little embarrassed at needing to trot that sentence out, but at least you can ultimately get it done!
What does that mean in Life?
Ah, the big questions. You've surveyed a microcosm of the rich universe of human experience and knowledge. Recognise that no matter how hard you try, you will never truly reach the end of the Plateau of Sustainability, and that there are probably a lot of Mount Stupids waiting for you.
What to do?
Work on harnessing other people's knowledge - do this by empowering yourself through outstanding information literacy, a commitment to continuous personal (and professional) development, cultivating a rich network of experts (including, and perhaps particularly, those whose views you find alien or difficult), and learn humility and a habit of listening to others. It should be immediately obvious that diversity in all senses is important here.
Recognise you'll get stuck in knowledge gaps - there, you need to realise that you either need to train yourself, reach out to a subject matter expert (and likely pay them), or stop, reverse and get out of there. The third option (give up) is rarely the right choice. Picking between the other two is really a risk/reward exercise (and recognise that your judgments as a neophyte in that area inevitably carries more risk) - is it personally worth a likely multi-year journey to master that topic to any reasonable degree? In many cases, it might not be. In others, it might be, but you need a well considered answer now; in others it may be, and you can afford the time to work at the knowledge. It is particularly valuable to be able to recognise when a "surface" understanding of a topic is good enough, and where is is likely to be a problem - of course, you're most easily able to assess that once you are well on the path to mastery...!
If you've not paused to consider ways to measure up the gulf between Mount Stupid and the Plateau of Sustainability, there's always a big clue in how long it takes to become a qualified expert in that field. Medicine requires many, many years of study and practice before someone becomes a junior doctor. Look to people you admire in your field, and consider how long it took them to get there. There are many further years of expertise, experience and training waiting as they become more specialised. You'll also note that cardio-thoracic surgeons just aren't going to quickly attempt neurosurgery, and there is a healthy system of referrals within the medical industry, recognising that nobody knows everything (not even Gregory House). What you can google about a medical topic is not likely to bring you up to a level playing field with an actual professional. Consider what might be the qualification of the expert you need for problem X? Do you need a lawyer or an actuary? An accountant? A statistician? What are the parallels in your profession? There are similar distinctions in IT - people who specialise in particular parts of the infrastructure (storage, network, compute), or the practice of using them (dev, ops) - and the myriad of different "flavours" of each of those things. IT is unusually "porous" in allowing you to quite easily jump into different tracks here; it is much harder for a "real" Engineer to jump between Civil to Mechanical or Electrical engineering, for instance, than it is to jump from "Network Engineer/Architect" to "Software Engineer/Architect", or something else (or vice versa). Likewise, doctors and surgeons don't simply change track within a year or two. I agree with those who think using the term "Engineer" or "Architect" as a job title without a professional standards body endorsing that is unwise and perhaps even disingenuous; however, in many countries this is both allowed, and commonly practiced. IT is still surprisingly young as an industry, and relatively unregulated (surprised?). Perhaps we will eventually have more rigorous standards for these nebulous titles, but until then, we must make sure that we personally try to live up to the high professional standards that "real" Engineers and Architects meet and display. Certainly, the importance of IT in modern society suggests we ought to move in that direction with some enthusiasm. That may make it harder to get into IT (because there will be more formal - and doubtless expensive - education requirements), but it will probably be good for the industry in terms of professionalism and robustness.
A particular point of humility that bears consideration is that of "business context". We are prone to two things in IT - wanting shiny baubles, and resistance to change (because Risk!). You need to understand that IT is there to provide a service to an organisation; IT is not in and of itself (usually) the goal of the company - but is increasingly important in how the goal is delivered. The goal is typically to sell products or services to someone - or the all too often ultimately destructive "maximise shareholder value". You don't necessarily need the latest or greatest toy, framework or technique. IT's role is to make an organisation's success as easy and effective as possible - with the best ROI, if not at the lowest cost, possible - and ensuring that executives are given the information they need to make sound decisions in business-centric IT contexts. This means that yes, you need to understand things about your organisation that are not purely IT - you need to listen to what the C-Suite are saying about the overall organisation, what marketing are saying about their target audience, and what your internal customers (colleagues) are saying about the services IT provides. This also takes time, but being able to understand these contexts and then deliver realistic solutions makes you a much more "useful" employee.
Of course, there is only so much time in the day, and this is why you will see that people often seem to lose some of their technical chops when they move into more "leadership" positions - they have to onboard that context, develop management skills, and so on - which inevitably, along with lack of all day hands-on IT experience, may mean they're less good than they once were at <some IT skill> - but they're bringing something else to the table as a result. When you're developing your career plan, take a long, hard look at whether you want to stay in a "hands on" role, or take on "leadership" or management roles. Again, either path is equally valid, but it needs to be right for you. In most organisations, if income or power/responsibilities are key drivers for you, a move into management or leadership is inevitable - but you may miss that intricate tech stuff. Also, be aware of "glue work" and make sure it is handled equitably! Sometimes, you can't answer that question (is leadership for me?) without experiencing it - this may require two lateral jumps - one into a leadership position, and perhaps one back out of it if it is not your "vibe", but you should be able to spare yourself that anguish by more carefully reflecting on what you do and don't like, and carefully investigating what life is actually like in such positions - perhaps even by thinking laterally and taking a leadership position outside of work in a charity, club or some other voluntary capacity.
The intellectual discomfort of knowing Mount Stupid is there waiting for you should be harnessed in making sure you push yourself right off that comfy summit and undertake profound life-long learning in all areas that make sense in your personal and professional life.
tl; dr:
- You probably don't know as much as you think you do.
- You certainly don't know what you don't know you don't know.
- You definitely need to do something about that.
#LearnMoar.
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