| This is a phenomenon referred to by various terms, including the Dunning-Kruger Effect and several colloquialisms (like "you don't know what you don't know"). The short version is that there is an inverse relationship between actual and perceived skill. In general, the better someone is at something, the less they rate themselves relative to their peers. This is a big problem when recruiting people for skilled positions. The best applicants assume that they won't be good enough and don't apply. The newest applicants have no reservations about applying and assume that they are qualified for anything, kind of like someone who graduates with a BS in CompSci and thinks it means he knows everything about being a professional programmer before he's even ever held a real programming position. Joel Spolsky discusses this too! I can't seem to find the post right now, though. The gist is that he was encouraging good developers to apply to Fog Creek, because he noticed that a lot of developers he would have liked to hire were intimidated about applying there, as he had previously discussed things like dismissing non-amazing candidates, how rare it is for good people to be on the market, and the extensive perks his company extended to its developers (like an office with a door that shuts). The good people read these posts and automatically filtered themselves out, no doubt comparing against their idealized version of what they'd like themselves to be, emphasizing the gaps and flaws that they know are in their resume, instead of the reality of the applicant field, the competence of which most good people grossly overestimate. There's another cheesy colloquialism that I think encompasses this well: "you're comparing your behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel". We use ourselves as the reference point for understanding others, but the intimacy we have with our own thoughts and failings can cause us to forget that they're not as big as they seem. We should be cautious before allowing ourselves to be intimidated by others, bearing in mind that we only see a small snippet of the picture. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect |