Lack of competence

Where I used to work "lack of competence" was the scapegoat for all the shortcomings of the organization. It annoyed the hell out of me because it reminded me George Carlin's critique of the use of euphemistic language. As the great man said: "American English is packed with euphemism because Americans have trouble dealing with reality and in order to shield themselves from it they use soft language." Well it is not just an American thing or at least it is not confined in America.

It wasn't just the descriptive nature of the phrase that bugged me it was the meaning and the way it was used. Lack of competence or incompetence was not the correct word to describe the problems that plagued our teams. If anything the competence level in that place was through the roof, however experience was lacking. Experience is the most valuable and expensive asset any employee carries and should be seen and managed by organizations as such. 

Experience is the difference between testing using the scatter-shot method (100 test cases and hopefully we'll get all the bugs) and knowing what four or five test cases will find bugs by reading the project's title. Experience creates experts/gurus/rock-star programmers, reduces design time, errors, increases quality and estimation accuracy but its cost is hefty because to create experience one has to go through the process of bad design, scatter-shot testing, blind estimations and failed projects. That is why experience needs to be actively managed, encouraged and guarded and that was why everybody blamed "lack of competence."

Hey I have been failing X amount of years so I must be experienced! Right? Wrong, just because you have been designing the same flawed solutions for X years doesn't mean you are a good programmer it means that you are an efficient, fast, proficient liability who should be promoted to management ASAP so that you stop poisoning young designers. Not everybody is capable of learning from experience and not all design configurations are conductive to building experience fast.

In the personal level experience is built with humility, drive for constant improvement and the thirst of learning of all these humility is the most difficult to hold on to once some experience is accrued yet it is what separates mediocracy from greatness because to lose humility is to lose the ability to learn.

So why was experience so lacking in my old organization were we all cocksure divas? No, it was quite the opposite actually. The culprit, for me, was the environment itself: testing was slow and cumbersome deterring experimentation, the platform system was extremely complicated and difficult to grasp, the documentation was "centrally" stored in multiple hard to reach locations and what is even worse was that a lot of the additional information (tutorials, presentations, descriptions) were not available as different individuals, teams, contractors and companies either guarded their "secrets," protected their work, or plainly were too busy to share.

This would be bad enough but adding the fear factor to the equation turned what was a bad dream into a full blown nightmare for experience building. In an economy where unemployment for youngsters reached 40% veiled termination threats were weaved into every discussion concerning human error rates which created an atmosphere of dread. In this atmosphere everybody tried to minimize their risks. There was an aversion to learning new skills, copy/paste programming was encouraged and new code was mostly shunned, estimations were based on formulas, while constant code peer reviews and scatter-shot testing strategies brought code production to a halt. Not only were we producing little to no value while working our fingers to the bone but we did not learn anything from it. Mistakes were not allowed, so they were swept under the rug.

Experience building is expensive because experience loves mistakes, but in order to learn from them we must be unafraid to assume responsibility, take ownership of error, document it, analyse it without prejudice and share the results. With the dread of error looming over our heads to take responsibility for our mistakes was an act of madness. In fact it took me accepting that "one day, I will quit this job" to allow me to spread my wings, try some crazy solutions and learn each day more than I was learning in a month under the veil of fear. How ironic that all this experience/value was being added after the decision that made it a temporary gain for the organization itself. In other words, by deciding I will leave the company I became a better employee.

All these thoughts are swimming in my head as I struggle to grasp the intricacies of building an Android app. I think they came to me because my schedule is slipping constantly, I refactor and alter the app's architecture every week, I strain to learn new concepts and I question my own competence all the time. I was trying to figure it out until it struck me, I am not incompetent I am just inexperienced. But I have no fear so I'll be fine.

Till next time,

Stratos out.