Nothing beats Experience

If you’ve been doing something for a long, long time, you’ve built up a lot of experience over the decades.

Experience doesn’t always mean deep knowledge, so you may not know why you should do certain things, but you will know the consequences of doing it different ways. You might not see underlying connections, or how to extend what you are doing to other disciplines. Practice is higher and lighter than theory. Theory is important, but more for enhancing the art than just getting things done.

Sometimes people believe that changes in the software industry trends invalidate experience, but more often they really are just shallow setbacks. Change is inevitable, but only real improvements matter and they are rare. It’s too popular these days to have change for the sake of change, it's mostly meaningless. Poor changes are always shallow, that is usually why they aren’t improvements, just noise. If you see enough of them, you see the pattern.

There are people in other disciplines who specialize in rearranging things that are often hired to improve any work. Sometimes they have good insights, but more often their naivety leads them astray. From the outside, everything looks simpler than it really is, so tweaking how it happens isn’t about creativity, but rather deep analysis. You can’t do this from an external perspective, or a theoretical perspective, it has to be from raw practical experience. You have to find the people who understand how to get it done and leverage their experiences to make viable improvements. Otherwise, you are just taking wild guesses.

As for learning, doing it yourself, over and over again, is a good way to begin. But it is far better to spend some time working with someone who already has great experience. Their talent transfers somewhat. If people like that aren’t available, then formal courses can be deep and useful. Lighter discussions can highlight interesting points, but most similar things are connected. Contradictions are vital in unraveling misinformation. Pretty much it is always learning a bit, test it out, then go back for more depth. Knowledge of complexity tends to evolve erratically. Again that is why working with someone who is good at what they do is best, they’ve already been lost earlier and found their way out.

If you want something big to get done, it starts first with assembling enough experience to get it done. Without that assemblage of talent, it will take a ridiculous amount of time to reinvent and relearn. Time that probably isn’t available.