Information Technology Dark Side  Struggles of a Self-Taught
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Demonstrate Competence by Developing Your Project Fluency
January 30th, 2008 · No Comments  A few days ago I blogged about
five ways we intuitively evaluate each other’s competency.
Fluency, the ability to use the vocabulary of the project
comfortably, is one of the most important. Without fluency, it’s
hard to move on to comprehension, expression, and nuance. If you
can’t speak the language of the project, you won’t be able to
understand the consequences of changes to the project easily.
Even if you manage to develop comprehension without fluency, it
won’t benefit you much. After a brief grace period, people will
begin to treat you as incompetent even if you are not, simply
because you don’t grasp the terminology of the situation. As an
example, I can overlook a new hire saying something really
stupid like “Java Real-time Engine” instead of “Java Run-time
Engine”, but I wouldn’t overlook tha