For this week, I chose to read the pattern ‘Create Feedback Loops’ from Chapter 5: Perpetual Learning. The name is pretty self explanatory as to what the pattern will be on, finding feedback on your progress. I chose this pattern because chapter 5 had the best info to digest, in my opinion, because I’m at that stage in my software craftsman career that where these patterns are the most relatable to me and will only prove to be more useful to me as time goes on. The context for this pattern is, not being able to tell if you’re unaware of how unskilled you actually are. By being unaware of your skill level, you are worse at assessing your own skills and when you do receive feedback, it’ll come as a surprise to your self assessment instead of a support mechanism to help you improve. I thought the context of this problem was spot on, the Dunning-Kruger effect came into my mind when I read this, sometimes people are too falsely confident of their own skills and clearly haven’t been told their real skill level on a certain subject matter. Ever since I became aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect, I’ve been trying to be more open minded to discussion and debate if I’m wrong on something.
For the problem of this pattern, it says your self assessment is only relative to the abilities you used opt have, you will always lack objectivity. I was not sure what this meant at first and I still don’t, however the next few parts that it describes I can relate to. It describes how being in a above-average team will make you feel like a superstar when in reality you’re more of a back up dancer, and how being on a below-average team will make you feel complacently smug. I can relate to this because in class, the backend team for the guest info system, they are definitely gonna go far in life as software craftsmen, I feel like they know what they’re doing which in turn makes me feel like I should know what I’m doing but, I’m just a back-up dancer.
For the solution of this pattern, you want to create mechanisms to regularly gather more or less objective external data about your performance. You will also want to be able to process the raw data from these mechanisms in order to get useful feedback about yourself. Honestly, the solution for this pattern was kind of confusing at first, I didn’t understand some of the mechanisms described but I’m sure in practice it is better than it is described.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Brendan Lai by Brendan Lai and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.