You know how I like to say “oh, you should pay special attention to expert-novice differences to get at the shape of some skill”?
Well, here’s John Carmack, one of the best computer programmers in the world, talking about the shape of his skill.
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It’s also super interesting that he’s comparing against other ‘world class’ programmers (for some strict definition of ‘world class’), and then highlighting the bit that he’s got a special edge in.
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One of the valuable things about reading expertise research is that you learn to pay special attention to “what makes someone a good X” type questions.
Here’s an example of one that just LEAPT out at me. The Q is: “what makes for an A+ growth/full stack marketing person?”
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“Almost impossible at the web browser level, but you should know what they all are even if you can’t know the perf characteristics (…) there are all these decisions that aren’t made in a globally optimal way but sometimes you can drive a thread of global optimality through it.”
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And a concrete example of what that looks like:
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That episode is so good. Shape of skill is fascinating to me. Feels related to vocab points.
As someone closer to novice, the more I work the more I feel the shape of my skill developing and becoming clearer.
I've also started noticing other people's shape more. It's very cool.
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At first, my manager had to explicitly point out why other people were better than me and what they were good at.
Now I'm kind of seeing it for myself without people pointing it out, and also realizing my strong/weak points.
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It's going to take me a week to get through this but fascinating conversation so far👀
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