| Some remarks: + There's a traditional sequence in skilled trades of apprentice -> journeyman -> master. A contemporary trade probably throws student on the front end and perhaps renames apprentice to 'intern'. What separates a student from an apprentice/intern is the type of problems they work on. The same idea distinguishes the journeyman from the apprentice except that the journeyman is expected to successfully solve the problems they work on. Etc for the master. What I am getting at is that there is a range of expertise and that what marks someone as an expert is the sort of problems they solve. But it's critical to realize that the context in which they solve those problems matters. This week thousands of students will be writing quicksort code. In 1960 it was the stuff of ...well CA Hoare probably was an expert programmer in an absolute sense, and perhaps a new journeyman among those who were programmers. Here again, context matters when talking about expertise...the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind and all that. + It's not really clear what you mean by 'expertise'. An expert AI programmer is someone who has solved expert level problems - one in an academic setting earns a credential. In a vocational setting it's going to take several. But in both settings the context is years, not hours per day. + Sure you're free to define what it means to be an expert. Regardless of what definition you choose, the question remains, what does an expert do that you aren't doing? This isn't a question of research. It's not a question of methodology. It's a question of personal opinion - that is, what activities would you have to do to meet your definition of an expert. Maybe that's working at Google. Maybe it's earning a phd. Maybe it's writing a replacement for HotSpot. + Once you know what sort of problems you need to solve to move toward being an expert, perhaps just trying to solve some of those problems is the place to start. I.e. what sort of problems does an apprentice or journeyman tackle? Good luck. |