Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The experts devise a better way to do things. The rest of us attempt to follow their expert lead. We flop.

Object-oriented programming flopped.

Microservices and serverless computing flopped.

I guess I could think of a few other great ideas that flopped. How about teaching kids to read via that total method or whatever it was called instead of “sound it out” or whatever that was called?

These and most other great ideas came from experts. Those experts are simply smarter than the rest of us, that is how they came to be called “experts.” Experts have great ideas. They use these great expert ideas to do great expert things that astound the rest of us.

Let’s all do it that way!

We spends lots of resources to do it like the experts. Many years later we are all sitting around looking at each other with wrinkled faces and headaches of frustration.

This wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

What happened? Well, let’s admit it: we weren’t smart enough to do it the way the experts did it. We didn’t draw our object-oriented diagrams correctly. We didn’t architect our systems correctly. We didn’t tell the kids how to think in four or five dimensions correctly. We just didn’t do it right because we just weren’t smart enough or disciplined enough or we just had too many other things to do instead.

Gosh. It seems this would be easier. It seems the experts would create a better way to do things that the rest of us could follow. Now and then that happens. This Internet thing seems to work. These computer typing programs seem to work.

I suppose we have to learn how to pick and choose which expert method fits us—the not-so-expert.