We may kid ourselves into thinking we're writing out of some sense of public good, or to create connections, or contribute some small bit of knowledge to the world. But let's face it. Most of us blog because we're raving egomaniacs. We not only love to hear ourselves talk, we're incredibly eager to hear other people talk about us, and the more the better. I think Dale Carnegie put it best.
A professional needs to be aware that they can make mistakes, and know how to mitigate them. For example, with unit tests and code reviews. Believing that you are infallible is certainly an unprofessional attitude.
But a professional does also need to be good at their job, and have the confidence to use their expertise. I feel that constantly saying, “I suck at everything”, however tongue in cheek the intention, does not inspire confidence, either in yourself or others.
I have confidence in what I know I have done before. I have confidence in knowing I can learn to do new things. I have confidence I can improve on what I did before.
But I think it is more important to know that what I did before was most likely (at the very least) not optimum and quite possibly ‘sucked’. Do I go around and tell potential clients that my previous solutions ‘sucked’? No - of course not. Do I tell potential employers? No - I tell them that those solutions could have been improved, and any employer worth working for would understand - the really good ones would understand if I said they sucked (my current employer does).
Personally, I would rather employ/work with someone who knows they ‘suck’, isn’t afraid to admit it, and works hard at improving - rather than someone who thinks they are God’s gift to the world and the rest of us ‘suck’, or even someone who doesn’t know they suck (BTDT, both - a number of times).
Meta-blogging (which he claims to hate)
Regurgitating the same stuff up again (this is the umpteenth “All my code sucks but so does everyones” post)
Increased time between posts
Less real content per post.
Contradicting himself between posts (good code = code that gets used, followed by even dead projects are useful)
I never got before people saying Jeff has a poor blog, but this post has caused me to look back and see, yes he does (at the very least as of late)
Am I the only one who realize what Jeff is up to? A while back he made a conscious decision to perform an experiment, “Let me see how many irrelevant, ego-centric and self-projecting blog posts I can write and still have people slobber all over me about how smart I am in the comments”.
He has pushed the boundary pretty far lately but there is still 80-85% comments in the ‘me too’ category. In this blog post Jeff says that you are only a professional if you know that the code you write suck and in the responses people are falling over themselves proclaiming that they suck at least twice as much as the next guy. Hilarious.
I am looking forward to the posting in a couple of weeks when Jeff will proclaim that you are only really smart if you are really dumb. The comments to that post will provide some serious entertainment.
And perhaps Jeff’s experiment will end at that point so he can go back to writing about interesting topics.
then you didn’t read his post about surgeons a few days ago
quoting Phenwoods on August 25, 2009 5:34 AM
[quote]
“In fact, that’s the tipping point between amateurs and professionals in our industry: the professionals realize everything they write sucks.”
If that were true then it would be a very sad reflection on our industry. I cannot think of any other industry that would regard knowingly being incompetent as a definition of professionalism.[/quote]
“He has pushed the boundary pretty far lately but there is still 80-85% comments in the ‘me too’ category. In this blog post Jeff says that you are only a professional if you know that the code you write suck and in the responses people are falling over themselves proclaiming that they suck at least twice as much as the next guy. Hilarious.”
Did you see his Windows 7 post a while back? That stirred up some real controversy with the comments, and plenty of people were completely against Jeff.
Don’t see anything in that about neurosurgeons knowing everything they do sucks. There’s the quoted part that says that the best surgeons are those that admit to making mistakes, and not blaming them on outside factors. As I’ve said before I agree completly that professionals need to admit they make mistakes, and try to avoid them. But the article then goes on to say, “What this attitude drives you to do is practice over and over again, until even the smallest imperfections are ironed out.”
Note, it doesn’t say it drives them to try to suck a little less next time.
Another quote from the article,
This is the hard part about understanding physical genius, because the source of that special skill—that “feel”—is still something of a mystery. “Sometimes during the course of an operation, there’ll be several possible ways of doing something, and I’ll size them up and, without having any conscious reason, I’ll just do one of them,” Wilson told me. […] When he talks about his extraordinary success as a surgeon, he gives the impression that he is talking about some abstract trait that he is neither responsible for nor completely able to understand. “It’s sort of an invisible hand,” he went on. “It begins almost to seem mystical. Sometimes a resident asks, ‘Why did you do that?’ and I say”—here Wilson gave a little shrug—" ‘Well, it just seemed like the right thing.’
Be careful clicking on those links in the Google Alerts. The URLs don’t appear to be vetted against the blacklists, and I found many sites word spam to become traps for malware.
“In fact, that’s the tipping point between amateurs and professionals in our industry: the professionals realize everything they write sucks.”
If that were true then it would be a very sad reflection on our industry. I cannot think of any other industry that would regard knowingly being incompetent as a definition of professionalism.
