This week, I took a look at the ‘Expose Your Ignorance’ apprenticeship pattern. The pattern describes the dilemma in which your employer is relying on you to do a job, but you are unfamiliar with some of the required tools. This situation can be the result of many things, one of them is you are the only person that was available to do the job. The pattern proposes that you “expose your ignorance” when you need help rather than staying silent and learning on your own. It is potentially beneficial for everyone when you can present the problems you are having. Over time, it becomes detrimental to protect your pride and hide the fact that you don’t understand what you are working with. Not only does it prevent you from learning and doing work, but it also increases the pressure and workload for the team. So the best way to avoid all of this is to get comfortable with asking for help and showing off your learning ability.
As soon as I read through the pattern I could immediately relate to the problem described. In the time I have spent working, there were always a few occasions where I would be completely lost. And though it was embarrassing at first, it was always beneficial to ask for help as soon as possible rather than waste time getting nothing done. I could also see this potentially occurring in a sprint, where team members are all occupied with their respective issues, and you are left with a task involving concepts you aren’t familiar with. There is always the pressure to show competence when working in a team, but as stated in the pattern, asking questions will expose your learning ability to your team and can even help them gain new clarity about their knowledge on the subject.
The therapist’s story mentioned in ‘The White Belt’ pattern was mentioned again, which involved taking a not-knowing stance to better understand clients. But in this case of this pattern, it is not feigning ignorance, but exposing it to learn. I think the comparison between an expert and a craftsman was interesting: “experts will do everything they can to remain wedded to a single context, narrowing the scope of their learning, their practice, and their projects. Craftsmen, on the other hand, need to have the courage and humility to set aside their expertise and wear The White Belt as they pick up an unfamiliar technology or learn a new domain.” But as mentioned before, it is not the goal of an apprentice to become an expert, but a craftsman. I will continue to keep in mind that it is important to expose my ignorance.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Null Pointer by vrotimmy and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.