RE: mastery (was RE: Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?

Subject: RE: mastery (was RE: Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?
From: "Richard L Hamilton" <dick -at- rlhamilton -dot- net>
To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:57:37 -0600

The 10,000 hour "rule" puts another perspective on hiring, and
helps explain why it makes sense to give tools experience less
weight than writing experience when hiring.

There's only so much time any of us can spend gaining expertise.
I'd hire someone who has put his or her 10,000 hours into writing
over someone whose 10,000 hours is in the tool (unless I'm hiring
a tools expert). Let the experts at the tools company spend their
10,000 hours making the tools easier to use, so managers can hire
based on something other than ability to wrangle Frame or Word or
whatever.

Richard Hamilton
---------------------------------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators
http://xmlpress.net
(970) 231-3624


> -----Original Message-----
> From: techwr-l-bounces+dick=rlhamilton -dot- net -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+dick=rlhamilton -dot- net -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- co
> m] On Behalf Of McLauchlan, Kevin
> Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 7:04 AM
> To: voxwoman
> Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: mastery (was RE: Have We Entered a Post-Literate
> Technological Age?
>
>
> I think the 10,000 hours refers to specific, directed
> practice at a particular kind of task. So, you'd have
> considerably less than that at the individual discrete skills
> that you employ to do the overall job. For example, somebody
> who has simply "been a working musician" for five years is
> not necessarily going to be a master at an instrument on
> which they've only dabbled, nor will they immediately master
> conducting, even if they got _some_ practice at it while they
> were busy working their way up to "first cello" during their
> five years with the philharmonic. On the third hand,
> somebody who got to be first cello after five years with the
> orchestra had probably put in at least ten thousand hours of
> cello-specific practice since discovering the instrument as a child.
>
> So to relate that back to what we do, you'd have - like many
> of us here - a helacious amount of hours under your belt
> doing research, writing and editing, and be quite good at it,
> but you might not have truly mastered your tools (maybe _you_
> did, but I'll explain what I mean). And you certainly would
> not have mastered aspects of our trade that simply didn't
> occur during your employment.
>
> I'll admit that I never mastered FrameMaker in the years that
> I used it as my primary documentation tool. I got "good
> enough". When I needed to learn some additional trick or
> method, I learned it. If I never had cause to use half the
> program's features, then I never got any practice in them,
> and therefore never came anywhere near mastering them. I
> actually had the Structured version, in the years that they
> charged extra for that feature set, but after an initial,
> abortive stab at converting to SGML-based documentation, I
> dropped the attempt and never went back. That's because the
> company... um.... reverse-grew, and lost an entire division
> that would have justified the trouble and expense of a
> rigorous, structured documentation stream. So I went back to
> the basic functionality, as a lone writer, which was all we needed.
>
> Prior to that, I'm not sure how much my overall mastery of my
> trade benefitted from many hundreds of hours working with
> Ventura Publisher in the late '80s. Or that year I spent
> with a classic Mac and Quark Express in 1990...
>
> The practice-toward-mastery in those years would have been
> with respect to digging into new info, organizing and
> distilling it, regurgitating it in a form designed to be
> useful to the audience. But a whole lot of incidental stuff
> got in the way, along the way. Much moreso, I would think,
> than would have been the case if I'd been a professional
> musician plying my trade.
>
> It goes back to what I was saying about us being generalists,
> with our fingers in many pies, rather than virtuosos in
> specific niches.
>
> Gladwell used examples like Bill Gates who had early
> opportunities to learn and really, really, really practice
> computer programming (same for the founder of Novell and a
> couple of others) that other people simply didn't get. He was
> in the right place at the right time. Same idea for the
> Beatles, who spent _years_ in Germany, grinding away for
> eight-hour shifts, six and seven days per week at tough club
> venues. That's how they mastered their chops long before they
> ever showed up on the shores of America. Certainly they were
> talented, which is why they started and kept with it, but
> what really counted was all the time and hard work they had
> put in, mastering what they did - playing music in front of audiences.
>
> - Kevin
>
> ________________________________
> From: voxwoman [mailto:voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2009 3:34 PM
> To: McLauchlan, Kevin
> Cc: Gene Kim-Eng; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: Re: Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?
>
> I heard about this number (and was talking about it with
> someone this morning) -10,000 hours to become a "world-class"
> musician (based on practice time for Julliard students, I believe).
>
> 10,000 hours may look like a very long time, but 10,000 hours
> is 5 years of full-time work. I've put in significantly
> *more* than 10K hours writing. In fact, I've put in, over the
> course of my life, 10,000 hours doing *laundry and dishes*
> (one of the "joys" of raising a family).
>
> That 10,000 hours (being a "master" rather than an apprentice
> or journeyman) is what employers are looking for when they
> are asking for over 5 year's experience.
>
> -Wendy
>
> On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 12:53 PM, McLauchlan, Kevin
> <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com<mailto:Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safe
> net-inc.com>> wrote:
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Gene Kim-Eng
> >
> > There is a difference between knowing how things work and how to do
> > things for yourself if you have to, and being able to do them well
> > enough for other people to admire you for your ability and be
> > willing to
> > pay you for it. :)
> >
> > Gene Kim-Eng
>
> As Malcolm Gladwell summarized in "Outliers", the difference
> between the two is roughly 10,000 hours of dedicated practice
> and pursuit of the skill. That is, the one who has the skill
> enough to be admired for it was probably not actually a
> "natural" - s/he just had enough talent or interest to keep
> at that pursuit instead of ten million other things s/he
> might have chosen to occupy her/his time, and so became a
> master of that skill... over the course of those 10 thousand hours.
>
> I think that many of us technical writers have not put 10,000
> hours of practice-and-study into anything, but we've put
> (perhaps) thousands of hours into enough things to be good
> generalists... and to have a good basis on which to pick up
> the next skill or knowledge.
>
>
> The information contained in this electronic mail transmission
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>
>
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> Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers
> developing Table of
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> 2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
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Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

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mastery (was RE: Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?: From: McLauchlan, Kevin

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