Knowing your limitations
Frans posts about a very interesting list of the ‘7 Deadly Sins of Software Development’ by Jon Skeet. There are a lot of these type of lists around (in fact, books have been written discussing similar stuff) but this one is especially good because it discusses three issues that don’t come up very often but are very worthwhile nonetheless.
One very important point on his list is #6 (”Failing to acknowledge weaknesses”). I think that because working in Software Engineering means hanging around with intelligent people often leads to a lot of insecurity. What happens is that this insecurity invokes some kind of defense mechanism in people where they have trouble admitting that there is stuff they don’t know, or perhaps are not as good at as they might want to be or feel is expected of them.
In practice however, this defense mechanism hampers personal development immensely: if you have trouble admitting you still have something to learn, actually learning something suddenly becomes very hard. I’m at a loss at how to get people to recognize this though, because bluntly confronting people with such an observation often gets them up in arms. Probably the defense mechanism again. I sometimes recognize similar things in myself: accepting work because I feel it’s something I should be good at, when in practice, I’m not (yet). In some situations it would be better to just acknowledge this and (for instance) get someone to help me with it.
