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Discussion on: Understanding The Hierarchy of Competence

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jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

Kathryn Grayson Nanz What drives you to write this? What is your intention? Be specific please. Is it the desire to help others on their way? Are you writing here to build a portfolio and did you read a self help book about encouraging optimism? Does it just feel nice to share with others? What do you ultimately get out of sharing your personal addition to the competence list with the rest of the world? why does this matter? Do you give a !@#$ if you get many likes on this? Do you seek additional insight from comments? Why did you write this? I am interested to learn this.

My experience is a completely different namespace and to a developer like myself the things you write are qualitatively 2 heart votes, a thinking vote and a nyan cat vote but utterly meaningless to me. However I also have this property that drives me to write posts completely different than this but in completely the same way as this for maybe completely the same reason.

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kathryngrayson profile image
Kathryn Grayson Nanz

In general, I blog for a combination of reasons, some of which you mentioned: to build a portfolio, to chronicle my learnings, to network. But mostly it's to share things I've found valuable in my own career, in the hopes that they're read by people who might not have heard them before and who will benefit from them. I'm self-taught, and there are many things that I only learned from some blogger on the internet – if I can pay it forward by being that blogger for someone else, that would be wonderful.

As for the likes and comments: I use them as a litmus test as to how much the topic resounded with others – a type of analytics. Some topics will naturally be more popular than others, and it's interesting to see which ones. But beyond that, no, I'm not personally invested and I don't derive any amount of self-worth from the number of likes.

Often I learn new things from the comments that are left (like one here that introduced me to another learning model, which was very interesting) – I enjoy being able to discuss the topics with the readers. If just one person leaves a comment that says something like "Thank you, I never knew about this and it's changed the way I think about it!" then the post is a wild success. It doesn't have to sway a crowd, but if it hits home for one person and makes a difference in their career, then it was worth writing.

Frankly, I don't much care that this is "utterly meaningless" to you – although it does make me wonder why you bothered leaving this comment. Do you make all the authors of the blogs you read defend why their posts "matter" or ask them why they "give a !@#$"? Or, was I just lucky? Be specific please.