Yes but it is that person's job is to spot those things. If I as a user can do a better job than them then something is very wrong with the resources/training they are provided. They should be better than I am, not worse.
Completely agree. The guy should look at his own profession first and realise how easily he could spot people who learnt a few phrases or facts then look again at himself.
Exceptionally well put; and good that you're aware of the shortcomings of looking too closely at dealing with the unknown. I love the succinctness of, "It's not the technology, it's the situations."
Obviously, crappy people with 10 years of experience are useless in any situation--it's just easier for them to blend in at Big Company X where they are one of a hundred. The rest of the article already applies well to how to weed those people out. Sadly, they're not always super-easy to spot.
"So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good."
This is true relative to their own ability. A highly competent person may consider themselves to be more skilled relative to average than an incompetent does, but the highly competent person will most likely still be under-estimating his ability and the incompetent over-estimating their ability.
This is critical, because it means thinking you suck doesn't imply that really you are good. A 95% percentile person might think they are in the 60th percentile, and so might a 5% person. Both have the same opinion of themselves.
Another critical point is Dunning-Kruger hypothesized that for highly skilled individuals this effect was due to their lack of awareness about how relatively unskilled others were. When they were given a chance to look at other work they were able to more accurately assess their knowledge.
One possible control is instead of asking individuals how good they are would be to show individuals existing code and ask them how good _it_ is. Dunning-Kruger would suggest that incompetent people would be too ignorant to accurately assess it, and most likely over-estimate its skill, whereas skilled people _are_ able to accurately assess fault in others' work.
A person who knows what they are doing versus someone who has difficulties learning the given tasks have two very subjective views of the workplace situation.
One is at the mercy of their colleagues, constantly and rightfully interrupted to correct their mistakes, while the other is chugging away in the zone.
We need the viewpoints of both levels of expertise to make sure that there is a whistle to blow.
We can’t truly test the edge of this function without finding the most least competent person ever. They’re like a perfect anti-classifier!
I’ve actually worked with people who were so persistently wrong that we could generally take their assertion or approach (and they’d almost always be the first to raise a finger to start dropping knowledge on us) as definitely not the right answer, thinning the search space by one option.
It was actually kind of amazing. The one (seriously, one) time one was right about something, the room was stunned.
That said, they did not increase productivity, so we need to search for someone more perfect…
You are pretty much wrong about that. And you seem to have a real attitude problem. Unless you can prove that the OP is bad at his job, the only thing that we can assume is that he is good at it, since he has been doing it for years.
That seems like a pretty negative pitch. "Come to our site and we'll tell you if your skills are BS or not." Usually people want to detect other people's BS, not their own.
3: It's obvious to me <observation that might require skill in domain>.
And then there's no appeal to an expert in the field, or observed behavior.
It's fair that sometimes negative effects are obvious, and if the writer was observing the deleterious effects of the button placement, I could see where they're coming from.
I think you're right most of the time, but I wonder if there's not also a certain personality type that like that, regardless of their actual competency level, that prefers doing as little as possible.
I wish one of my ex-employers had been better at filtering out that type of people.
> How do you tell the difference between someone who is legitimately experienced and someone who's skill is putting on appearances?
Those who have legitimate experience can detect their peers. Unfortunately, this is highly contextual. You can be a competent Ruby on Rails guy, but still suffer from Dunning-Krueger when trying to evaluate an iOS developer.
You can also go back to first principles. Do people live their lives and engage in conversations in a way that indicates they understand the epistemological stance of scientists? I have a super power in this regard. I exude a field that makes undesirable people prejudge me, to the point where they make factual mistakes.
Have you ever been in a job or taken a class with other people and not been able to see the different between the more competent and more incompetent people?
Most managers are unable to adjust for their own biases, though.
I'm especially skeptical of managers who evaluate themselves as having above average technical ability after they have asserted how poorly most people evaluate their peers. The necessary conclusion of such an assertion is that people therefore haven't a rational basis on which to judge their own skills relative to others.
Sorry, maybe my post sounded more serious than I intended it to. I wasn't trying to be combative, I was merely pointing out the irony of lecturing someone about insulting people on a professional forum, when your first post could easily be interpreted as bragging and insulting the people you work with. I'm sure you didn't mean it that way and had good intentions. There's nothing wrong in principle with saying you're good at something. I think it's the direct comparison with specific people and the implication that they are slowing you down that has the potential to be interpreted negatively.
Actually it's not universally true that people working closely together know who is competent and who is not. Because you yourself need to be competent to know if others are doing a good job or not. If you are surrounded by incompetent morons you as likely might be labeled as incompetent by them and since they are the majority you lose the battle. It doesn't even have to be done on purpose by the morons, they just don't know they are bad at what they are are doing and create a kind of a circlejerk re-assuring themselves
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