Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

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Unskilled and Unaware of It
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

A 1999 article by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology studied the effects of competence on self-assessment.

Kruger and Dunning found that incompetent people suffer from a dual burden: not only are they incompetent, their incompetence blinds them to their own incompetence. The experiments found that bottom quartile performers consistently estimated themselves as performing above average.

The article reported significant findings for top quartile performers as well. Top performers consistently estimated themselves as performing lower (compared to peers) than their actual performance. They fell prey to the false-consensus effect, in which people assume their peers are as competent as they are.

The researchers found that training combined with peer collaboration allowed both competent and incompetent people to improve the accuracy of their self-assessments.

What are the implications for software development? Surely there is a significant percentage of incompetent software developers out there in the world. Kruger and Dunning's findings suggest that the majority of these developers believe that they are above average...

Uh-oh. I believe I'm above average. How can I be sure that I am not Unskilled and Unaware of It? Unlike the tests administered by Kruger and Dunning, software development is far from objective. We can successfully solve a business problem and write brittle, bloated software at the same time. It happens every day all over the world. So if I am unskilled, how do I become More Aware of It?

The best way I know how to protect myself from being Unskilled and Unaware of It is to continually train myself and to surround myself with people I regard as competent. I want to be around people who will challenge my ideas, people strong enough to disagree with me. These are the types of people who will inspire me to learn rather than lead me toward a false sense of competence.

"Everybody on an XP team should feel like an idiot regularly." --Extreme Programming Applied: Playing to Win, p. 62, Ken Auer and Roy Miller

Another tell-tale sign of becoming More Aware of It is a universal learning phenomenon: the more I learn, the more I understand how much more I need to learn. As long as I regularly experience this phenomenon, I know I'm headed in the right direction.

"If we can get introduced to our ignorance, isn't that something worth celebrating?" --The New Peoplemaking, p. 220, Virginia Satir

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