In fact, that breaks down into 3 things: competence, knowledge, and experience, but only because the last two are often indicators of the first, so it would be unwise to dismiss them.
Achievements are a symptom of competence, so I do respect people who have achieved what I consider great things.
However, even where someone is knowledgeable, experienced, and having apparently achieved great things, if they display something which indicates a severe lack of competence, my respect for them will automatically decrease - not to zero, of course, but still, it can take a severe hit.
The irony is that people who have competence, knowledge, and experience usually got that way by taking risks and pushing themselves out of their comfort zone. And if you observe them taking a risk that doesn't pan out, it looks like incompetence.
Everyone was a novice once, and even experts are novices when they enter a domain outside of their expertise.
Nostrademons, I think this is an important insight. I respect people who will go outside their domain because they feel a need to solve an important problem. It takes a lot of guts, for the reason you articulated.
>And if you observe them taking a risk that doesn't pan out, it looks like incompetence.
Maybe... but everyone makes mistakes. There has to be a difference between making mistakes, and making the same mistakes over and over again. I definitely think part of competence is how someone handles failures.
You don't get a chance to observe most people over and over again - that's usually limited to friends and immediate coworkers (team members). Not coincidentally, those are the groups you should tap for startup cofounders.
The original question seemed to be about celebrity personalities and casual acquaintances - "when you Google someone..." etc.
We're not talking about "like" or even "can bear the company of" here, we're talking about respect. I'm friends with many people who I don't respect in a work sense.
Perhaps my mistake was not to append "in a work sense" to the word "respect".
Also, part of being competent at evaluating other people's competence is not to base your evaluation on a single sample.
A guy was brought in to consult on a startup I've been contracting for. I googled him: He had done something fairly impressive and pioneering in the early days of the web, and he currently held a writing/editorial position at a fairly prestigious web publication besides whatever company he was with. He was supposed to be polyglot, writing in PHP, .Net, and Ruby. I was kinda impressed--I mean, I don't have a wikipedia page.
So he helped us get off the ground with some new-to-us tech we were using, but it turned out that his Ruby code pretty much sucked. So maybe Ruby's not really his thing. He was supposed to be writing about PHP at that publication, so I looked up his articles. Not a single one with even a line of code. Just unfulfilled future plans and occasional business/culture musings. And really the problems with the Ruby code weren't just syntax or library unfamiliarity--there were smells there that should have been bothersome in any language.
So I start filing bugs against his code, and it turns out he's not interested in fixing them. In fact, if the startup has any more "architectural" consulting they want him to do, he'd be happy to weigh in, but he doesn't really like to code much anymore.
Yeah--my respect for him as a developer went way, way down. (I'm not comfortable saying respect generally here.)
It sounds like he might have some great talents, but they're obviously not in the areas the startup hired him for (so he's misrepresenting himself?).
I once worked with an amazingly talented, ambitious young guy who ended up causing extreme problems for the company and for himself, not because he was incompetent per se -- but because he misrepresented where his talents lay (as a political maneuver, a power play). I lost a lot of respect for him -- for his lack of awareness and integrity. (He wasn't humble either, but I think that could have been OK if only he'd have been able to make good on his big claims).
Actually he fulfilled his most important purpose perfectly.
What he was brought in for to begin with was because the three of us working on the project semi-long-term had finally all agreed (or, the other guys finally agreed with me--but I was just the UX guy, what did I know?) that we had chosen the wrong web platform in the beginning by selecting some enterprisey Java thing that none of us had used before and that now was the time to correct our mistake and port the web portion to RoR, which two of us knew pretty well. The idea of a port made the business founder nervous, and she wanted someone to tell her it was ok.
So in a conference call, architecture guy hedged and spoke in generalities and tentatively endorsed the developer consensus, which was the best he could have done if he'd been the greatest hacker on earth, since business founder was being silly about protecting the idea and wouldn't tell him what exactly we were doing or let him look at the code base.
It wasn't until after the important decision was made that he signed an NDA and produced the bad code. So I wasn't impressed with architecture guy, but (without knowing how much we paid him) I'd say he did little lasting harm and at the critical point he did nothing in the appropriate way to allow business founder to trust her developers' decision.
An architect whose code is bad is a bad architect. Anyone who doesn't know first-hand the capabilities and limitations of the tools, platforms etc has nothing to offer but opinions. Not even at the level of "advice". And we all know that an opinion and $2 will get you a cup of coffee.
That's a typical programmer viewpoint. The problem is, competence usually displays itself in tactical solutions. Strategic and long-term planning do show themselves readily as so black-and-white, good-and-bad.
You admit it here, "even where someone is knowledgeable, experienced, and having apparently achieved great things, if they display something which indicates a severe lack of competence, my respect for them will automatically decrease"
I'm sorry, but everyone is incompetent somewhere or somehow. If you don't know where or how, you just don't know that person well enough.
How do you define competence? Competence seems like a word that can mean anything, just as long as the job is done. Do you respect certain kinds of competence (ie. coding) more than others (ie. political maneuvering)?
For a politician, being 'competent' might mean, at times, being the most ruthless, machiavellian snake in the room (with the smiling, innocent face of a bunny-rabbit of course) -- because at the end of the day, he's the guy who gets the laws made / votes plugged-in and thus furthers the mission of the party. (and that mission might be an honourable one.)
For an entrepreneur, it might mean being an amazing smooth-talking sales guy (the kind who actually makes sales, not the kind who turns everybody off with an annoying voice) who makes you uncomfortable with the promises he makes, yet allows the company to just-barely-survive through a tough spot.
If a guy starts a web app company and drives it to success by outsourcing the programming offshore, do you respect him less than the guy who codes it himself?
Just curious because you said that somebody can have "apparently achieved great things" yet still display a "severe lack of competence".
I once saw a street vendor in Thailand prepare a pineapple in his hand with a machete in a mere 20 seconds: from 'as nature made it' to 'skinned, cubed, on a stick, in a bag' - in 20 seconds !
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Interesting. So if a guy can learn how to do something quite inconsequential but extremely well -- is that a faster path to respect than doing a more difficult task in an average manner?
Reminds me of a study I read some time ago about how when you give a gift, get the most bang-for-the-buck by purchasing the most expensive product in a cheap product category. ie. You get a lot more credit in their mind if you give them a $100 scarf than a $150 dress.
In fact, that breaks down into 3 things: competence, knowledge, and experience, but only because the last two are often indicators of the first, so it would be unwise to dismiss them.
Achievements are a symptom of competence, so I do respect people who have achieved what I consider great things.
However, even where someone is knowledgeable, experienced, and having apparently achieved great things, if they display something which indicates a severe lack of competence, my respect for them will automatically decrease - not to zero, of course, but still, it can take a severe hit.