Marc relates a strange experience when training people in a large company. Although they pretented to know Java, they actually did not know much about it.
We have a saying in France : "in the land of blind people, one-eyed ones are kings". Marc obviously met the one-eyed people of that company. But one-eyed kings can only keep their crown if the land's frontiers are kept closed, because the outside world is full of two-eyed people...
Now I sometimes think the opensource-java land is populated by strange aliens that have three eyes. The third eye is the community that we are living in : nice projects and smart people decuple the knowledge... and widens the gap with one-eyed kings.
Beware, ignorant kings, Cluetrain is at work, and frontiers will fall down rather sooner than later !
Posted by Sylvain Wallez at February 5, 2003 09:57 AMMaybe the third eye is the "eye of knowledge"... Think about it.
Seriously I agree what you say, but I would like to add that people who have a very large company can better appreciate their own position compared to their friends. So they can better eval what they know (compared to the other people) That's why I'm not certain that they underestimate themselves. They can just eval that they know a very little of the whole knowledge.
Of course you can always find better than you. The thing is that you have to know yourself, your limits, and above all, always find a way to get better.
Posted by: Loic Quintin de Kercadio on March 5, 2003 10:12 AM... which reminds me of that circle of knowledge theory: http://blogs.cocoondev.org/tomk/archives/000745.html
Posted by: Steven Noels on March 17, 2003 12:26 PM