What is the value of experience? This is a question that especially as a beginner, I had very often as a software engineer, and it's one that I think is really hard to answer because we want everyone to feel valuable in the beginning of their career, to have unique value as a beginner, but also to understand that experience does have a specific value, and that specific value, we're going to talk about it today, that value is intuition. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. So the value of intuition. We're talking about intuition today, but we're not just going to talk about it as a positive thing. As with most things, as with most powers, if you want to call it that, most skills, it comes with a downside. Intuition does have a downside, and you can probably guess some of that downside. If you've been listening to this show for very long at all, you can probably imagine that it has something to do with the way that our brains work. So we're going to talk about two kind of curses of intuition. And then also two blessings of intuition, if you want to call it something different, feel free. These are two good things and two bad things. So let's talk about the two curses first. The first curse is that intuition is very good, but it's not perfect. So we can't rely on it completely. We've experienced this, especially as younger engineers, probably younger in their careers. I mean, people who have a lot of experience. I've been working with people who do have good intuition, but they rely on it as if it is infallible. This is the problem. If you're good 99% of the time, then you can't rely on that all the way. You can't just use intuition to make decisions. Intuition is very good at giving you a direction, which is the kind of piece of advice to take away from this particular curse. Very good. Very good at giving you a direction to go. Right? It's good. It's a great pointer. But sometimes our intuition is totally off. Right? Let's back up for a minute and talk about what intuition is to begin with. Intuition is essentially the well-worn path in our brain. It's a well-worn path because we've given our brains a consistent kind of pattern, a consistent. kind of stimulus. And the brain is recognizing that pattern faster and faster because that pathway is well-worn. We'll save some of the neuroscience for people who are more qualified to talk about it. But this idea is fairly simple. Our brains recognize patterns very well. That's a very important thing that we can do as humans. And when we see patterns that we've seen a lot of times before, our brains are very good at taking a bunch of shortcuts. Right? We're no longer having to evaluate those things really thoroughly to understand them. We have very good models for those things. Now, we have a lot of intuition just naturally as human beings. For example, anything that you do on essentially on autopilot, that is because you built intuition for how to do that thing. For a perfect example of this, those of us who are able, we walk, we walk using what we would. We wouldn't really call it. Intuition probably, but that's the same concept, right? We have some keen sense of the patterns of walking. We can look at the ground and understand what our feet are going to feel like if we were to walk on that ground well in advance. Once again, our pattern recognition is an intentional effort by our brains to try to predict some future. And so when you start recognizing a pattern, the intuition part is understanding what plays out. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? develop. It takes experience to develop. But this first curse that we're talking about here, which is that sometimes our intuition is wrong, is a byproduct of randomness in the universe, right? We can recognize patterns that are actually not what we think they are. We can see things happening that are not actually happening. Our brains being very good at recognizing patterns are not very good at recognizing when something is random. We're not very good at recognizing when there's a hole in the plot to our story because we want to make things make sense. When things make sense, we tend to succeed. And so, we try to make things make sense even when they don't. So, our intuition is kind of biased towards kicking in more often than it should, sometimes, we use that intuition in situations where we should take a step back and say, no, I don't have a perfect picture of how this plays out. Okay, so that's curse number one. We're actually going to switch back and forth between curse and blessing. So we are not all negative and then all positive. The first blessing of intuition. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you Thank you. And I will send you an invite to that Discord community. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.