Your friendly office idiot
A friend of mine (whom I’ll be doing a website for shortly) mentioned last night that she was impressed that I was able to learn all I know about web development from the internet (more or less)… and, come to think of it, so am I. There can’t be many careers where the internet enables you to become fully trained and, arguably, more informed than people who learn their craft just from courses and books.
But it got me thinking about how gradual a process it’s been, picking up all these skills. Starting with html, then on to CSS, then a little functional php and javascript, a slight detour into google maps, then on to fully OOP programming using jQuery and Zend framework. And I came to realise that for many of these, especially the early ones, the reason I’d started to look into them was because I worked with an idiot that didn’t understand what they were doing.
Indeed, there’s nothing like incompetence in somebody who should know what they’re doing to spur you on to learn how to do it yourself. If you’re dealing with an expert there’s very little chance your embryonic efforts will outshine theirs, and you’ll probably have little reason to want to bypass them anyway. But if you’re stuck with an idiot that constantly frustrates you with their incompetence and inability to do the simplest things, then it’s easy to convince yourself that you could do better, so you start to learn the basics, pretty confident in the knowledge that if you master these you’ll already be light years ahead of your resident idiot. Maybe all companies should have an official idiot hiring quota as part of their professional development strategy.
So here’s to you, idiots, for leading me, and probably many others, to a decent career.
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Tags: idiots, incompetence, professional development, self-taught