The Internalization Problem
One of the most costly organizational mistakes is asking an Expert to write onboarding documentation for Novices. The Expert writes from their current mental model — which has no explicit rules, only intuition.
The Expert writes: "Configure the environment variables and spin up the stack."
The Novice reads: "Which variables? Where do I set them? What does 'spin up' mean? Which command? What does success look like?"
The Expert is not being lazy or dismissive. They have internalized the rules so completely that they have forgotten they exist. They operate on autopilot. The steps are invisible to them — like asking a fluent speaker to explain why they chose a particular word order in a sentence.
This is sometimes called the "curse of knowledge" — once you know something deeply, it becomes nearly impossible to remember what it was like not to know it.
The Practical Fix
Have Competent or Proficient engineers write documentation for Novices. They are close enough to the learning experience to remember the pain points, but skilled enough to produce accurate content. Experts should review for correctness, not write the first draft.
A useful heuristic: if your runbook was written by someone who could execute it in their sleep, it probably has critical gaps for someone running it for the first time. Have a Novice execute it while narrating what confuses them. Every point of confusion is a documentation bug.
Context-Dependence as a Skill Signal
One of the clearest signals of Dreyfus stage is how an engineer answers open-ended questions.
Ask a group of engineers: "What is the best database for our new service?"
- Novice: "Postgres! It's what I know." (Context-free answer, applies their one rule universally.)
- Advanced Beginner: "Postgres, unless you need something faster." (Slight situational awareness, but still defaulting to a rule.)
- Competent: "It depends on the access patterns. What's the read/write ratio? Do we need transactions?" (Starts asking for context before answering.)
- Proficient: "Walk me through the service. I want to understand the query patterns, the scale expectations, and the team's operational familiarity before I recommend anything." (Holistic, context-first.)
- Expert: Asks three questions you hadn't thought of, then recommends something you hadn't considered, and explains exactly why it fits your specific constraints.
The progression from "Postgres!" to "It depends" is not a sign of indecisiveness — it is a sign of genuine expertise. Novices give confident, wrong answers. Experts give uncertain, correct ones.