Nicholas Frota

The biggest assumption you are making is that everyone on your new team will have a level of expertise commensurate with both their title and the number of years they have in the field. You think this because you aren't yet taking the Dunning-Kruger effect into account.

I recently worked with a very senior architect who had never heard of the idea of logging application errors. It didn't make any sense to him when I suggested it and it took I think *five* meetings over the course of A YEAR before he finally accepted the idea.

This architect had been at the company for quite a few years. When he was hired he was fairly junior and it would have been acceptable for him to not be immediatley familiar with every aspect of application logging. But he never got any better at it. Why? Dunning-Kruger.

You see, engineers affected by Dunning-Kruger do not learn, because they think they already know everything. They remain stuck at a relatively junior level of knowledge throughout their careers (barring some kind of awakening of self-awareness, which ime rarely occurs).

How, you might ask, could an engineer remain at a "fairly junior level of knowledge" and survive in the industry? It is because the Web is not particularly sophisticated as computing technologies go. You can cruise along knowing a little bit and bossing others around and be fine

So it's not at all the case that on your first dev gig you're going to be the least knowledgeable person on your new team. You might be the most knowledgable! After all, you're the one that's been studying all the newest stuff and practicing it dilligently.

Another aspect of Dunning-Kruger is people affected by it tend to take their own advice a lot. You, new to the field and to your role, will likely be listening *very* carefully to everyone around you. Web programming is a lot more about listening to people than it is about code

When I had hardly any experience, people in management praised my dev skills. At the time it fed my impostor syndrome couldn't they see I was JUNIOR?? Surely they *would* soon see and then I'd be In Trouble. But in fact they were right: I was the best listener on the team.