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.)
5 Comments
You could however be seduced by experienced developers that are being called ninjas by others
Good article, you could also include the words specialists, experts, consultants, etc.
Posted by David Coallier at 10:47 am on 30 September, 2009.
“rockstars” is also thrown around a lot when talking about programmers. Now where the hell are my groupies?
Posted by Colm at 3:24 pm on 30 September, 2009.
I also believe tacit knowledge is the exact fuel for situations when you just need to tell them ‘Trust me’ and move on. Tough I believe it’s something more frequent for us, designers, who have a supposedly larger ‘intuition’ aspect to our work.
Posted by Bruno Bergher at 1:04 pm on 1 October, 2009.
I enjoyed that post, tacit knowledge is certainly hard to come by, and sometimes even when you think you know it all you’re really just beginning to open pandora’s box.
Anyone out there, be careful wishing for tacit knowledge about any subject… that is if there is such a thing!
Posted by Cian at 1:39 am on 2 October, 2009.
Rockstars and ninjas have all the wrong characteristics for good software development.
(Petulant bursts of highly-assisted creativity, substance abuse; ability to throw dangerous objects, perform shady & covert assassinations, etc etc)
Aspire to be a “London Cabbie Developer”.
(You maybe knew they even call it “The Knowledge”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#The_Knowledge )
Posted by James Pearce at 5:54 pm on 8 October, 2009.