I think what you said both here and in your post are very valuable additions indeed.<p>To me what it feels like you&#x27;re saying is - when you are truly an &quot;expert&quot;, it is more likely that you can identify&#x2F;recognize other &quot;experts&quot; - or even people with that potential.<p>When I look at my own skills, I try to rate myself honestly on the following scale with regards to some particular skill: expert, professional or amateur.<p>Expert is a guru-level understanding.  If I say that I am an expert, I am saying I think I am as good as the top x% (where x is maybe 1-10) in a particular skill.  For me, I pretty much never rate myself as this in any skill!<p>Professional is practiced, practical, hands-on real world skill.  You&#x27;ve honed this skill, you&#x27;ve been formally trained, you&#x27;ve employed this skill successfully in a repeated, demonstrated way.<p>Amateur is a hobby, done it a few times, do it for fun or would like to do it&#x2F;get better at it level of experience.<p>I observed that in traditional skilled tradesmanship, we have the apprentice, who progresses to the journeyman, who progresses to the master craftsman.  These are the same levels of what I mean by amateur, professional and expert.<p>I don&#x27;t know why our industry seems to reject some of these concepts from skilled trades in terms of organizing into better&#x2F;stronger professional trade organizations and certifications.<p>Actually, the way we often talk about coding as a &quot;craft&quot;, it&#x27;s almost like we would feel a lot better with a formal organization and such a career progression&#x2F;structure in place.<p>We have our 1%&#x27;ers in the software community, our gurus&#x2F;experts&#x2F;master craftsman.  I often think of these as the core contributing past and current &quot;fathers&quot; and &quot;mothers&quot; of our industry, people ranging anywhere from Ada Lovelace to Vint Cerf.  Reality is, those core thinkers are probably where many of us learn from anyway - that and &quot;hacking&#x2F;tinkering&quot; which is what many of us do and can still lead to progress too.<p>To me it&#x27;s all connected, but something about our community always holds us back... maybe there it is the element of not wanting to be forced into structure either.  After all, the &quot;hacker&quot; ethos is also a source of our strength, and part of the art.