“I don’t know.”
The ability to say this is a thing that elevates really good developers. And knowledge workers in general. Hell, even just people in general.
But technical people have a particularly hard time saying we don’t know how to do something. We feel like we’re supposed to know. (“Feel“, not “think”. It bothers us when we don’t know. And when we look like we don’t know.)
This tendency makes us susceptible to promising things even when we have no idea whether we can deliver them. Throw in a little flattery and it’s even harder.
Try this on for size: “I don’t know how to do that. Here’s what I could do to learn.”
