I had the opportunity to hear Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmers fame, not the Wendy's guy) give his (and his partner Andy Hunt's) Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep speech last week. It was a high-level talk on software development, psychology, expertise and generally how to move (yourself and/or others) along the expertise curve.

The core message is that developers of different expertise need to be managed differently. The novice has different needs and goals than the expert, and there are things we can do to maximize each of their contributions. While Dave loves process, he says process alone cannot overcome poor personnel. He also challenged the assumption that expertise is increased by adding knowledge. (When the brain gets to full, we are experts, right?)

Dave used the Dreyfus Model, a meta-model for skill acquisition used in looking at artificial intelligence. The Dreyfus has 5 stages of expertise:

• The Novice is task-oriented, relies on context-free rules and has no sense of the big picture.
• The Advanced Beginner starts to rely on contextual rules and intuition, but is still dependent and generally task-oriented.
• The Competent person still lacks some sense of the big picture, but is self-sufficient and can recognize contextual rules.
• The Proficient person relies heavily on intuition and begins to ask why.
• The Expert performs his task intuitively.

The majority of the development world, he says, falls under Advanced Beginner, which is a problem. Why? Tasks performed by the Advanced Beginner require a modicum of skill and are generally task-oriented - in other words, easy to outsource.

Dave asserts that expertise cannot be boiled down to rules because we lose the original context for the rule in the process. This is one of the biggest challenge in artificial intelligence, of course, and a similar problem with best practices. Truth, he says, is contextual - and it's often very difficult to capture the context in these situations. Rather, there are two dials - rules and intuition. As we move along the five stages, we increasingly rely less on rules and more on intuition. The expert rarely uses a recipe.

It should come as no surprise, having attended a liberal arts college, that I agree with and have been preaching most of the points that Dave raised. The whole point of a liberal arts education is learning how to learn and trying to understand something in the greater context.

I also had the chance to have a small lunch with Dave and about 10-12 other co-workers, which was a great experience. There was a lot of insight flowing around that table.

An older version of the presentation is available here (warning: PPT link).

( And by the way, I think Dave likes Ruby on Rails... )