What a beginner can still see

In 2014 I started work at a federal agency, assessing audit reports and preparing the monthly working papers behind a trial balance. I did not understand most of what I was looking at, and the specific quality of that period was that everything seemed odd.

Not difficult. Odd. Why does this get signed by that person. Why is this threshold that number and not a round one. Why do we do this step before the other one when the other one produces the input. I asked a great many of those questions and the answers were usually fine and occasionally were not answers at all.

Eleven years later I moved into technical delivery and had the whole experience again, in a completely different vocabulary, and this time I could see what was happening to me.

Fluency turns off the strangeness detector

The thing nobody warns you about is that competence does not arrive as knowledge. It arrives as a decline in the number of things that register as worth asking about.

You learn a domain by absorbing an enormous number of local conventions, and the way absorption works is that the convention stops being visible as a convention. It becomes just how it is. That is not a failure of attention. It is the mechanism by which you get fast, because a person who finds everything remarkable cannot get through a day, and the entire value of an experienced practitioner is that they have stopped spending attention on the ninety eight percent that is fine.

But you cannot tune that. You do not get to keep the alarm for genuinely strange things and switch it off for the merely unfamiliar, because at the time you are absorbing them they look identical. The detector goes quiet across the board.

So the trade is real, it is heavily in favour of expertise, and it is irreversible in the domain where you made it. I cannot un-know the conventions of a month-end. There are things in that work I could not find strange now if I tried, and I know for a fact that some of them are, because I remember thinking so in 2014 and I no longer do.

Why the usual version of this is not quite honest

There is a comfortable thing senior people say to juniors, which is that fresh eyes are valuable and please do ask.

It is comfortable because it costs nothing and it is not really believed. And it should not be believed in the form it is usually stated, because a beginner’s signal is extremely noisy. Most of what strikes a newcomer as odd is merely unfamiliar, and separating the two takes an experienced person’s time, which is the expensive resource in the room. Ten questions to find one that matters is a bad trade for the answerer and everybody involved knows it, which is why the invitation to ask is issued warmly and honoured tepidly.

The reason to care about the beginner’s signal is not that it is accurate. It is that it is the only source of it. The expert cannot generate the signal at all, at any price, in that domain. A noisy instrument beats no instrument, but you have to say the noisy part out loud or you end up with a slogan.

Keep starting things, and stay suspicious of obviousness

Keep starting things, which sounds like advice and is mostly just what has happened to me.

The useful version is narrower than it sounds. Starting a new field does not restore your judgement in the old one. It does something smaller. It reminds you that the sensation of everything being obvious is a state you are in rather than a property of the material, and once you have felt that state switch on and off a couple of times you become mildly suspicious of it.

That is all I have got. I cannot recover what a piece of accounting work looked like to me in my first year. I can remember that it looked like something else, and I can notice, in delivery work now, that the number of things I stop at has been falling for a while.

I do not know whether that is the same as getting better. It is what getting better has felt like both times.