Skill Vs. Experience

Skill and experience can have a lot in common. If you have a lot of experience doing something, you can become very skilled at doing it. Alternatively, you can be very skilled at doing something, and that can take the place of spending time gaining experience.

Consider this video of a technically skilled mountaineer and a monk walking up a mountain.

The person with the camera knows the technical way to get up a mountainside. The monk on the other hand, just knows how to walk up the side of a mountain. End result, they both end up in the same place, but the path they take is very different.

Another way to say it is:

In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Or maybe you heard it in an intro physics class, where it when something like this:

Everything I’m going to teach you in this class is wrong. Or more accurately, not exactly correct. It’s good enough for most things you do, but it’s not exact. Newton’s laws of motion are mostly correct, and the equations of motion are close enough for day to day things, but there’s a lot more depth to understand.

Knowing the rules is a skill. Knowing when you can and can’t apply them is experience.

And finally, lots of people know Arthur Clarke had at least 3 laws because they know his 3rd law, which is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. But many people don’t know what his 1st law is.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

That elderly scientist has enough skill and knowledge in a field to know what’s possible even if they don’t know how to do it. On the other hand, their lack of experience can sometimes blind them to possibilities,

All of those are ways of pointing out that just because you have some skill and training, you don’t know everything. Skills can get you pretty far, and in many (most?) cases far enough. But you need experience as well.

I’m a decent rough carpenter. I can frame a wall or hang a door. They’ll be plumb, square, and level. I have the skill to do it. But it takes me a while. And very often I get part way through and realize it would have been easier if I had done something else first. That’s because I’m not experienced enough. I don’t do finish carpentry or build furniture. That requires a level of experience I just don’t have.

The same applies in development. In software development (and many other areas) you want to be efficient. That often means only building what you need. When you find out you need more, you refactor and add what you need. That’s skill based. It works. Every time. And it’s way more efficient than building some elaborate thing you don’t need, then figuring out a way to shoehorn it in to the problem you actually have.

Consider this situation. You’re building a tool to transform some data. You know the input file name, so you just hard code it into the tool. Great. It works. Then you find out that need to know the name in a couple of places in the code, so make it a defined constant. Again, great. Then you find out that there are actually different files that you’ll need to read in different situations. So you make it an input parameter. That’s using your skills. But if you’ve got enough experience you realize that you’re going to need to handle multiple file names from the beginning and you build it that way up front. With the starting name as the default. That’s even more efficient and that’s what experience gets you.

Skill might also tell you that you could build the tool to handle an input file that is a list of files to process. And that each of those input files will need a different output name, so you make the input file contain that. And each of those input files might need different permissions to be read, so you figure out how to get the right secrets to read the file.

What experience can also tell you is while you could do those things, you shouldn’t. Those kinds of problems belong to someone (or something else). It’s experience that tells you to use The Unix Way. Or at least you shouldn’t do them until there’s a demonstrated need for them.

On the other hand, if all your experience is in doing the exact same thing, the exact same way, you end up blocked. You don’t have lots of experience. Instead, you have many instances of the same experience. That’s not true experience. And it’s probably not true skill either. Because true skill is made up of lots of sub-skills. By themselves, the sub-skills aren’t nearly as useful.

So next time you have an opportunity to use your skills to increase your experience, or to use your experience to get some new skills, take it. The more you have of both, the better you’ll do.