Tacit knowledge and ninjas

In London last week, Des and I were late for a train. “Victoria Station, please”, I shouted, but the taxi driver was in gear and en route before I had finished the first syllable. But just as quickly, she stopped, reversed her cab, and began again in an altogether different direction. “That way will be very busy tonight”, she said.

According to Baker in Pricing on Purpose:

The majority of the most important knowledge in any field or endeavour, be it sports, entertainment, or business, is tacit knowledge… This form of knowledge is extremely difficult to articulate and relatively expensive to transfer, often travelling only through apprenticeship and trial and error.

Tacit knowledge is everything a GPS device can’t hold. It’s everything not in a Ruby on Rails reference book. It can’t be found on this blog or even in a Computer Science degree course, nevermind a set of top-20 posts.

If excellence is a thing you do every day, tacit knowledge is a thing you pick up every day. It’s the thing that big and little mistakes and big and little successes teach you. In software, it’s the experience of doing software over time.

Don’t be seduced by inexperienced developers that call themselves ninjas; knowing how to program isn’t even half the battle. (And anyway, ninjas are the guys that run around in costumes with swords and stuff.)