Cowboy Developers, and Intellectual Curiosity
“An inch wide and a mile deep” — this is a pretty good description of most of the #CowboyDeveloper s out there, people who know a lot about one thing, but not a lot about anything else. What I find particularly fascinating about them however, is that their remarkable lack of intellectual curiosity around anything that isn’t their area of expertise. As far as I can tell, they only (maybe!) pick up new things when they’ve been bludgeoned with it repeatedly, with pretty much the entire universe showing them that it is relevant and important. And, even then , it’s probably going to get ignored by them. A fairly common reason for this is insecurity, which tends to manifest itself in two ways • Need for Respect : Admitting that there is something else — and new! — out there is tantamount to admitting that there is something they don’t know. And if there is stuff they don’t know, people won’t respect them (after all, they don’t know things !). And then, they w...