How Much Knowledge is Enough?

I’ve had a bee in my bonnet for a good few years now, which is this:

How do you learn enough about something new to be useful when you are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week?

Another bee is how much do you actually need to know to become useful? The bee following that one is if you do not have enough time to investigate something, how do you find the answer? Buzzing up behind is to fully understand how something works, you often need a staggering amount of back knowledge – how do you get it? Oh dear, it’s a hive in my head, not a single bee.

I am of course in this blog mostly thinking about Oracle and in particular Oracle performance. I think that these days it must be really very hard to get going with performance tuning as it has become such a broad topic. I don’t know if you have noticed but nearly all the performance experts are not in their teens. Or twenties. And precious few in their thirties. Forties are pretty much the norm.  We {and please excuse my audacity in putting myself in such an august group}  have been doing Oracle and performance for many years and have stacked up knowledge and understanding to help us.

For me this issue was thrown into sharp relief about 4 or 5 years ago. I had become a manager and, although I was learning lots of other skills and things, when it came to Oracle Technology I think I was forgetting more than I was learning. Oh, I was learning some new Oracle stuff but it was at a more infrastructure level. The real kick of reality was going to presentations on performance and Oracle internals. At the end of the 90’s I would go along and learn one or two new things but knew 90% of what was said. By the mid 2000’s I would go along and know 50% , the other 50% would be new. Then I went to one talk and found I was scribbling away as I knew precious little of what was being presented. More worryingly, I was struggling with “How does this fit in with what I already know?”.  I just didn’t know enough of the modern stuff.

That was a pivotal moment for me. It had the immediate effect of making me start reading blogs and books and manuals again. It’s not easy to find the time but I soon noticed the benefit. Even if I learnt only a little more one evening a week, I would invariably find that knowledge helping me the very next week or month. I was back on the road to being an expert. {Or so I thought}. Oh, it had a long term effect too. I changed job and went back to the technical, but that is for another day.

But hang on, during my decline I had not stopped being useful. I was still the Oracle performance expert where I worked and could still solve most of the performance issues I came across. It made me realise you do not need to know everything to be useful and you could solve a lot of problems without knowing every little detail of how something works. A good general knowledge of the Oracle environment and a logical approach to problem solving goes a long way.

I actually started to get annoyed by the “attitude” of experts who would bang on and on and on about how you should test everything and prove to yourself that your fix to a problem had fixed itas otherwise it was just being hopeful. I thought to myself “That is fine for you, oh exalted expert, as you have time for all this and don’t have 60 hours of day job to do every week. Give us a break and get real. Most of us have to get the problem solved, move on and get by with imperfect knowledge. Doing all that testing and proving, although nice in a perfect world, is not going to happen”.

Yep, I had an attitude problem :-). I was getting angry at what I now think is just a difference in perception. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

I don’t think I am going to go back on my opinion that for most people in a normal job, there simply is not time to do all the testing and proving and you have to move on, Making do with received knowledge. It just is not an ideal world. However, we need the experts to uncover that knowledge and we need experts who are willing to communicate that knowledge and we need experts we can rely on. I am very, very grateful to the experts I have learned from.  

All the time on blogs, forums and conversations the issue of “how do we know what sources we can trust” regularly comes up. Well, unfortunately I think that if you do not have time to do the testing and learning needed to become an expert yourself, you have to simple chose your experts, accept what they say but remain slightly skeptical about what they say. Everyone makes mistakes after all. I would advise you only accept someone as an expert and rely on their advice if they are willing to demonstrate why they believe what they believe. Everything else is just an unsubstantiated opinion. 

But I’ve come to some conclusions about most of the above questions I started with.

1. If you are judicious in choosing your sources, you can learn more reliably and easily.
2. Even a little bit of more knowledge helps and it often comes into use very quickly.
3. The hard part? You have to make that time to learn, sorry.
4. Although testing and proving is good, life is not perfect. If you did (1) you might get away without it. But don’t blame the expert if you get caught out.

But I’ve not addressed the point about needing all that back knowledge to fully understand how something works. Well, I think there is no short cut on that one. If you want to be an expert you need that background. And you need to be sure about that background. And that is where it all has fallen apart for me. I started a blog!

I already knew you learn a lot by teaching others, I’ve been running training courses on and off for a few years. But in writing a blog that is open to the whole community, I’ve realised I know less than I thought. A lot less. And if I want to be a source of knowledge, an expert, I have to fill a lot of those gaps. So I am going to have to read a lot, test things, makes sure that when I believe I know something I’ve checked into it and, when I fix something, I know why it is fixed {as best I can, that is} . All those things experts tell us we need to do. And that brings me back to my perception issue. 

Those who I think of as the best in this field all pretty much give the advice to test and prove. And they have to do this themselves all the time, to make sure what they say is right. And they are the best as what they say is nearly always right. It seems to be excellent advice.

However, I think it is only good advice, as it is advice you can’t always take, because there is too much else to do. I think sometimes experts forget that many people are just too pressured at work to do their own testing, not because they don’t want to test but because you can only live so long without sleeping. 

Anyway, I said something foolish about becoming an expert. I better go and check out some other blogs… start reading some manuals… try out a few ideas on my test database.  I’ll get back to you on how I’m progressing on that one in about, say, a year or two? All those gaps to fill….