July 2010 Entries

The Five Levels of Incompetence

In my “Learning and Teaching” post last week, I talked about the different stages of learning, from “unconscious incompetence” up to “unconscious competence.” It occurred to me today, though, that there really are different levels within those levels and, in particular, there are some very distinct levels of incompetence that I’ve encountered in my nearly (yikes!) two decades of working in the industry. The reason why the levels of incompetence are somewhat more important than the various levels of competence, it seems to me, is that incompetent people are often a very real threat to the stability of teams that...

T-SQL Tuesday #8: Learning and Teaching

Since I’m joining the T-SQL community, I thought I’d try my hand at a “T-SQL Tuesday” that I could actually have an opinion about. This week’s question (hosted by Robert Davis, a.k.a. @SQLSoldier on Twitter) is “How do you learn? How do you teach? What are you learning or teaching?” and is very relevant for me because, of course, I just joined the T-SQL team a short while ago and am doing a whole lot of learning at the moment. How I learn I was going to say “by doing,” but I don’t think...