The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.
This isn’t a social media thing exclusively of course, I’ve met it in the real world too.
When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.
I’ve dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it’s even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!
And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn’t endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone’s past.
So I’m curious, do some fields experience this more than others?
If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?
Software engineers, supposed “experts”, can’t even agree among each other how to structure and build software, let alone agree with project managers, users and other laypeople.
Source: Am software engineer.
Structure and build? Look at the guy using Waterfall instead of Agile development.
Source: Am also software engineer.
I’d call it healthy debate but I’ve never met a software engineer who had a healthy anything
In my experience there are two types of software engineers. Those who are narcissistic and believe their own bullshit and those who suffer from crippling imposter syndrome. Few can agree on what is the best way to do things but most will agree to do things the wrong way for money.
Crazy thing is that doing it the wrong way is the best way to have job security. Fire me? Yea, well, you’ll never find anyone else that knows this spaghetti as well as I do.
I was brought in to a place where the guy had pulled out all the comments and replaced all the variable names with random strings. Saved himself on his personal USB stick the real code.
That’s because whatever system you’ve got now feels old and tired, but that new system that just came out looks so new and useful. I mean, it can’t hurt to change the entire thing half way through development again, right?