Coping with Illusions of Competence
Learning how to learn as a software engineer
There are lots of methods to learning and implement that knowledge. One of the ways to learning is to implement the concepts that you learn. However, there is one problem with retaining information that I often encounter that I believe you might have experienced this one too.
Each time when you study material for a test, and while looking through all the materials it seemed like you understand it all. However, when you closed the book, and do certain problems, you realized that you actually can’t implement the information that you just learn on that problem.
You might go check out the solution and look at the solution. “It makes sense”, you think. Then, you close the book. Walkthrough a couple of examples of problems, and think that you can solve the problem for the test.
The next day, you had your test, but you bombed it.
This is usually called the illusion of competence. It is the idea that we think we know more than we actually do. The material that we are studying looks simple for us, and we are surprised how often it falls under our radar. Essentially, we fall on mastering the material over and over again.
Let’s say you are preparing for a software engineer interview. You study all the data structure and…
