Pros and Cons Are Inseparable
While my perception of my own knowledge path has been something like “I know nothing” -> “I know everything” -> “I know nothing”, engineers at any level can become overly convinced that their own approach is the correct one. A junior engineer straight out of school may be overly biased toward approaches taught there, which may or may not be effective in, for instance, a heavily product- and market-driven environment. Someone with a few years of experience may, due to their own definition of what success looks like, believe they have arrived and there’s not much more to learn. (This was me during the dot-com bubble.) A senior engineer with a decade or more of either going deep or wide can become too set in their ways and reluctant to incorporate different thinking, like single-brain groupthink. The rock star engineer, if you subscribe to such a thing, may well have developed an ego matching the size and approach attributes of a tropical island dictatorship. ...