The Missing README

2 Getting to Conscious Competence

Martin M. Broadwell defines four stages of competence in Teaching for Learning: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. Specifically, unconscious incompetence means you are unable to perform a task correctly and are unaware of the gap. Conscious incompetence means you are unable to perform a task correctly but are aware of the gap. Conscious competence means you are capable of performing a task with effort. Finally, unconscious competence means you are capable of performing a task effortlessly.

All engineers start out consciously or unconsciously incompetent. Even if you know everything about software engineering (an impossible task), you’re going ...