“Be the Worst” Apprenticeship pattern

I am writing this blog post about the “Be the Worst” apprenticeship pattern from the Apprenticeship Patterns book. To summarize the idea of the pattern, it is about trying to be in the presence of people with more experience than you so that you can learn from them, as opposed to being experienced already and not having the opportunity to learn from others. I can see this being a useful way to learn, but at the same time it does seem a bit selfish to put your own education above the quality of whatever it is you happen to be working on with everyone else. To be the worst may indicate that you do not actually belong where you are while you exploit the opportunity to learn. If this does not turn out to be a concern then it is still the case that you would not be performing as well as anyone else, so it may be discouraging to have a responsibility and not be prepared for it. Maybe being the worst is taking it to the extreme, but the more general goal of not being the smartest person in the room is a good way to learn from the person who does have more experience. I have been programming in the same language for the last decade and I now know everything about the language down to the exact differences between each version, and that came from being involved with other people who had knowledge that I did not have. Now there is no learning opportunity after having mastered this language, so since I have not nearly the same level of experience in any other language, it would be a significant learning opportunity to surround myself with experts in another language that I intend to become versed in. Since I have learned everything I needed to know to do the things I want to do, I have stopped learning at the same rate. Moving forward into a career, I expect it will become necessary to be just as experienced in more languages, so engaging with experienced programmers who use those languages will be beneficial.