I don’t want all my output on this blog to be old grumpy guy ranting about the state of the world. But I do feel like some of them need to be that way. Because there are a few things that really drive me nuts with the state of writing and social media. Lots of people say they are experts at things, which I have never felt comfortable with myself. I know that I know things, but I am never comfortable say that I am an expert.

But what really amazes me is how many posts I see that have people professing something like this:

———–

I used to be terrible at what I did.

Then I learned this one feature/pattern/whatever to always/never use!

Now you can an expert just by following my advice.

———-

People blogging and sharing stuff they learn is one of my favorite things, I absolutely love the middle part of that sequence. Tell me about a feature that you found interesting and then went out, did some research, and now you re excited to share. This is 100% the content I want to see about technology, theme parks, washing dishes, whatever! Expert or not, every one of you have things you can teach even the most experty-expert.

But, if you really were terrible at something (even mediocre) and you learned one technique or even a set of techniques and think you became a guru from that one thing…you are:

• Wrong about how bad you were
• Wrong about how good you are

And I would bet the farm on the latter.

Typical first missing thing:
Where’d you learn this big thing!

The thing that is always conspicuously missing from these posts? Attribution. How did you learn these things? Did you read a blog about it? A LinkedIn post? A book? A class? Hearing where you learned something informs the reader how much to take yon seriously. Honestly, sometimes people who think they have learned something incredible have just learned something that matches the word better than you expect. It is not credible. Sharing your sources (and comparing other sources) can really help your credibility and help others too. (And sometimes, you will get comments that say “no, that person is wrong”, which stinks, but we are in a journey, not a lightning strike of change from bad to good.

In fact, this blog was born when someone said something suspiciously like what I said I did in one of these types of posts. I don’t care that much about the credit, and I honestly am not suggesting that person read my post. I just wanted to learn more about the process they came to get what I did and was sad I couldn’t learn more..

Look, I get that most of the core knowledge you will be sharing, even that which someone taught you, is primarily stuff that is general knowledge. The people you learned from only have copyright on the words they used. But you didn’t just pull this knowledge out of your own…brain. Sharing that there are other smart people in the world is not bad and very useful to others.

Typically also missing:
Depth

Too often, there is some list of things to do to solve huge problems. All you need to clean data is to do these few things on this graphic. Sometimes the graphic is useful as a high level list, sometimes maybe not, but either way the amount of depth you can stuff in a single graphic is always limited. So many posts I see could be 50 posts with just a little bit of depth.

Life on the engagement farm

The lack of depth is interesting and too often I feel like it is the point. To get people to correct them and interact with the post (AKA Engagement Farming). I have no idea how this can work so well for so long, but it definitely seems to work for many people.

The problem though is this. Unless your goal is to be a social media influencer/marketer, engagement is not your goal. Clout is. Lots of followers comes second. First is content that teaches people something. Then content that is well written. Finally expanding reach. You primary technical blog/post goal is to put knowledge out there that will get you your next gig. And the next one. And the next one.

It is awesome to share, even if you are not a guru

In fact, most people who could call themselves gurus wouldn’t likely use that word to describe their skill level. Intelligence is typically as much knowing that what you don’t know is huge compared with I what you do know.

I have more experience at some things like SQL than most people reading this. I have lots of skill at some things; too. The thing I can tell you is that I don’t know nearly everything, even on the things I know lots about.

I can help people learn stuff, and you can too. Techniques you learn, share them. They could certainly be helpful. But 99.9999% of people out there writing blogs don’t have it all all figured out. We just have some things figured out that we can help add to your toolbelt.

Summary

Stop pretending that you went from zero to hero doing anything you can put in a technical post or blog. You can’t. You can make great leaps by learning a single technique, but you didn’t come up with it yourself.

Like I love when people say things like “I used to have some much trouble tuning queries and then I discovered the secret sauce: indexing”. Discovered how? You telling me that you were just poking around in the source code of the SQL engine and found them. Because they were secret?

I am all for marketing yourself, just keep it real.