The true value of being experienced
Everyone is creative. The value of experience is the application of experience in the right place.
The newbie cook applies his creativity to understanding the instructions in the recipe, figuring out how to slice the tomatoes, finding the right knife, determining if the meat is fully cooked. The experienced chef does all that by habit and rote — so he can spend his efforts getting the spices right and freelancing with a shallot or some exotic mustard — or tequila.
The newbie software engineer worries about whether the add-on packages are compatible, which sort algorithm to use, and how to manage the product manager. The experienced engineer knows what kinds of problems cause which bugs, how to optimize the compute and network time so the lags are unnoticeable, and what clever feature will impress the product manager so much that they’ll go away and stop bugging her.
The newbie writer worries about whether to use “said” or “shared,” how much description to include, and how long the sentences should be. The experienced writer imagines how the reader ought to feel and then crafts the language to achieve that end.
Experience is about what you don’t think about
The experienced, expert creator doesn’t think about where the tools are, how they work, or what effect the create. They’ve done it a thousand times, they don’t need to worry about all that. They worry about the emotion they’re creating and once they’ve determined that, the creative tools just do what they’ve always done . . . but in the hands of an expert, generating an effect never seen before.
Hacks take shortcuts to do adequate work and finish faster.
Masters take shortcuts so they can spend time on the creation of an impossibly elegant and powerful result.
“How did you do that?” we ask.
“I don’t know,” they answer. But what they really mean is, “I couldn’t really explain it, because the tools just did what I wanted them to do.”
Experience is hard won. But experienced work is far more fun. It’s worth the effort to get there.
Reminds me of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
This post makes an excellent point, revealing (without really saying so) why the experienced should be paid appropriately for their work. As my father approached retirement, he tried to get the national corporation he worked for as an engineer to assign a newbie engineer or two to work with him, so he could pass along his experience, but they ignored him. Then when he had to take early retirement for medical reasons, they actually called him while he was in the hospital, asking him to come in and show some youngsters how to do the job. (If only …) It’s amazing how short-sighted many companies are, seemingly deliberately so.
It puts me in mind of the relationship between my mother and me. We were close enough – psychically, perhaps – that when she had a project in mind, she’d do all the homework, and then when I came to help her achieve it, we rarely had to talk about it. Maybe our brains ‘mind-melded’ in some way, so that without verbal or written communication, each knew what the other could and would do to bring the project to fruition.