I often approach technical topics with an "art and science of X" mindset. The "art" part is usually a way of seeing rather than doing. It's only after the science part becomes second nature that you can see artistically. If you want to learn to see nails, become a hammer.
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Instead, they have a sense of where they are incompetent, but don't identify with their incompetence. It's just an area where they haven't put in the time to get competent. This means, incompetence does not blind the artistic eye or get them into "partial science-of-X" stuckness.
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Instead, good techies tend to have a meta-awareness of where they have, and have not, earned an "artistic eye" level of mastery, and pick their battles within those artistry zones (unless it's a learning project, in which case it's required to wander into partial-science zones)
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Personal note: I'm a mediocre techie at best, but I think I have a pretty strong sense of where I do and do not have a degree of "artistic" eye. Much of this is due to randomly reading through intro texts of a variety of other engineering disciplines while I was an undergrad.
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For example, though I was a mechanical engineering major, I read through Tannenbaum's OS text in 1993 to demystify operating systems. I read some other beginner text on semiconductor manufacturing. And a lot of steel metallurgy by virtue of being a steel-town kid. To what end?
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I certainly didn't attain even partial science mastery, let alone artistic mastery in those subjects. But I did demystify the subjects for myself. 90% of my technical demystification education has been self-imposed. Anti-anxiety meds basically. Only a few tech areas scare me now.
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Going deeper to artistry in a few narrow areas completed the meta-education. I can now look at 90% of tech subject areas/challenge, not have a panic attack, read a few primers/101 level things, enough to hold up an art+science conversation with people at mastery level
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Technology is a vast, fragmented and endlessly specialized landscape of human striving. There's basically no way for anyone to have mastery at anything beyond a narrow patch, and at most 1-2 abstraction levels up or down.
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Our ENTIRE ability as a species to solve problems more complex than the artistic-mastery bandwidth of any one person rests on our ability to communicate past our little silo areas without constantly having anxiety attacks. The anxiety response management IS the uber-tech skill.
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End of conversation
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This is true for good engineers, but dammit I encounter too many irritating, overconfident stemlords on the interwebs.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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