In essence, what all this grammar means is that The Dunning-Krueger Effect is when someone is overconfident at a particular thing that they are not skilled at. As we all know by now, this is ultimately bad news!

NB: To sound cool, we will be calling The Dunning-Krueger effect DKE in the rest of this article 😄

However, Sadly, There is no doctor’s assessment or procedure to discover if a person suffers from DKE. Yes, there is no Magic to it, the only way to discover it in a person is Self-assessment. Yes yes yes I know it sounds cringe to me too 😢
A person will have to look at themselves in other to assess aspects that are important to their identity and whatever activities it is they are engaged in.

Now unto the reason we are reading this together (This is me impersonating the voice in your head). DKE can badly affect the progress of a person or group of people. And it sucks being that guy whose overconfidence is dragging everybody backwards.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not insinuating that you sell yourself short, I am only saying that we help you recognize if you have been bluffing. I'm going to make a list of things to do to make sure you attack yourself enough to know if you're that guy who's annoying around every one or most people. ‘

• Do you tend to overestimate your level of skill?

• Do you tend to fail to recognize the skills of others because you probably feel you are better than them at that same thing?

• Do you fail to recognize the extremity of your inadequacy?

• Do you claim expertise without providing evidence?

• Do you tend to have limited education or work experience in the field, or you may have a history of making false or misleading claims?

You probably do not like me at this point but trust me we are going somewhere.

How do you overcome the Dunning-Krueger Effect?

I hate to be that guy but overcoming the DKE requires a combination of self-awareness, a willingness to learn and feedback from others.

Appreciate criticism, ensure to always pick the point and strategize on how you can improve yourself (In the first place you feel like an expert so why not find your weaknesses and just fix them to become a demigod at that skill???)

You see, just like the father before our fathers told our fathers who then told us, learning is a continuous process, there is always something new out there to learn about your field or outside your field, so if you stop learning you are shooting yourself in the leg.

Be aware of your limitations. This way, you can always recognize anytime you are overestimating your abilities. This can help you avoid making mistakes or poor decisions based on false assumptions.

You can find a mentor or coach who can provide guidance and support as you develop your skills and expertise.

As techies and really in all fields, it is important that we ensure that we are clear of the DKE as it will help our career and journey have a more organic, healthy growth.

I know everyone has probably felt the same high or similar high as I felt that day, But this article is centred more on the mistakes I made since that day till now that if I could turn back the hands of time, I would not make them again.

NB: I am not some skilled professional or anything of the sort, If anything I am a “Still figuring it out | learning from my mistakes” person.

Focus

With the advancement from my “Hello, World”(lol), I started to learn the concepts of my preferred programming language(s) with so much determination but the least focus, I found everything in tech intriguing and never actually completely seeded my understanding in any for too long, I remember going from writing codes to trying to make animations and even went into the blockchain industry for a while.

As exciting as it may sound, the absence of focus on the one thing I started with and genuinely wanted to be an expert at, made me spend a lot of years beating around the bush without making a significant impact in any field. I did not stay in animations enough to be the next generation of animators for Spider-Man across the Spider-verse or the next Satoshi Nakamoto in the blockchain industry.

I feel like we don’t celebrate people that stay focused on whatever field or career path they have chosen for themselves enough, I believe that one of the easiest things I could easily and always do was to change my career path in a split second for any reason. Either it was because someone with a tech stack was super admirable in my eyes, or I like how codes in one PL are being structured.

This is not some advice to not switch fields or experience the best of everything, This is a suggestion that as alluring as it may seem, it will be pretty nice if a person stays in their field and put their best in their career journey.

ABSENCE OF A COMMUNITY

Yes, yes, yes, I know how interesting it is to want to be that dev that stays in the dark and does those super amazing things, I also used to be one of those people.

I did not speak to people in the same career path as mine and even when I did, I did not share my challenges or discoveries or resources with them… I was a “ghost” for a long while, and being a ghost is equal to a disturbingly sad life and no help.

Now hear me out, A community of people in tech generally or people in your preferred tech path will do you tremendous benefit. Maybe when I had started tech, if I had joined a community or more than one community, I would have been able to stay motivated and not make impulsive decisions that wasted a lot of my time. A community is like a shelter every developer out there needs, a place where they can get resources and get mentorship, get spoken to by successful people in the industry and people that are ideally getting it right in the same field as you.

In the most persuasive tone Join a community today, because sincerely you will be doing yourself more good than you can comprehend.

HEALTHINESS

I feel like I am one of those people that understands excitement very much, I know how exciting you find that JavaScript that you just started learning and I know how much you want to do Python all day because it is so exciting. In my own honest opinion, I see writing codes as art, there are not many differences between developers and painters.

It took four years to paint the Monalisa, and from this, we can deduce that Davinci was not painting every day for 4 years. He was not spending 6 hours a day stroking paintbrushes on canvases. The point here is that creativity thrives better in healthiness.

What do I mean? Maybe you should not be writing 6 hours of code every day that leaves you exhausted at the end of it all and makes it that you cannot enjoy anything else. I know I know, we all want to build the next Flutterwave, or the next Opay, or Microsoft. But you won’t be able to do it properly by completely spending all your time writing only codes. There are a lot of things that go into running a successful life and career that codes alone cannot bring you.

“When it comes to tech, writing codes is one of the easy parts when compared to others(not necessarily simple, but easy)” — Akintunde Sultan (CO founder AltSchool Africa)

I will like to end this with a common saying “It is never that deep”.

Drink water and grow healthily.