This rings so true! I have no idea about programming, in Supply Chain and logistics I do see the same thing so. And the most frustrating people to work with are those stuck at > 2. without realizing it.
Fascinating! I don’t know about supply chain, but I can tell you it’s the same in programming. I suspect these points apply to creative ideas in general.
Well, so far I've seen it SCM (professionally), you see it in sports basically every weekend (we have close to 80 million national soccer coaches in Germany), I've seen it in boxing (I'm nowhere near to number 2 there anymore, but usually novices come with no idea, then they think are good until someone shows them "nah, you still don't know how to box")... So I guess it is the same everywhere in any ___domain.
> OK, so far I’ve mentioned three levels of achievement as a programmer:
> 1. You don’t know clean from unclean.
> 2. You have a superficial idea of cleanliness, mostly at the level of conformance to coding conventions.
> 3. You start to smell subtle hints of uncleanliness beneath the surface and they bug you enough to reach out and fix the code.
> There’s an even higher level, though, which is what I really want to talk about:
> 4. You deliberately architect your code in such a way that your nose for uncleanliness makes your code more likely to be correct.
> This is the real art: making robust code by literally inventing conventions that make errors stand out on the screen.