How Do You Know You Are Right? I spend a significant amount of time working alone at my desk. I write articles, edit them, and share my opinions. However, I am constantly concerned about being wrong. How can I overcome this feeling? If this were a live session, I would eagerly listen to the answers to this question. Since it isn't, I will go ahead and share my methods and look forward to your feedback and ideas in the comments! The Modern Starting Point My first place to seek guidance is the Internet. Like most everyone these days, I love the Internet. This is, of course, despite its vastness and potential drawbacks (many of which stem from much of its content coming from people who are confident they are right, whether they are or not). While the Internet can be overwhelming at times with many answers purporting to be correct (and many of those not correct that they are correct), it serves as a treasure trove of knowledge that my set of Compton’s Encyclopedias never possessed. As long as you realize that Internet is not always as reliable as those books were, you can learn almost anything if you look around multiple locations saying the same thing. Or at least one source you actually trust The Internet also has another issue: you often need a clear idea of what you are looking for. For instance, say I wanted to validate something like someone who told me of the only way to view your data in a database. So maybe I search for “how do you view the data in a database?” Typing this into a search engine, I found that this search led me to the CREATE VIEW statement. While it is true that if I had asked the question more precisely, I could have reached the SELECT statement I am probably looking for, I needed context that I may not have if I were not writing this editorial on SQL Server Central. Not knowing enough about a subject to ask a question about it is a significant portion of my life at times. Searching and exploring the Internet to validate my knowledge, even when I am certain of it, is a bit maddening while also being mostly very educational. Teamwork Enhances the Clichés The overall point I am trying to get to here is that the old adage “two heads are better than one” is not entirely false, despite what the average introverted tech person may wish to believe. Where the Internet answers questions, they don't have the value that other people have. While effective collaboration and task adherence are crucial to working with other people, there is immense value in having individuals you can rely on and ask questions of, mostly without judgment. A little concerned/jovial judgement is okay at times, like if I need to ask how to view data in a database, I either deserve some teasing or may require medical attention. Having a team or even something like pair programming can be a beneficial approach, specifically because time spent thinking and validating ideas is a significant cost of producing work like programming because it is typically more about deciding what to do than it is rote work that is basically mindless. Getting things done correctly the first time pays off more than keys clacking out mediocre output. The time spent deliberating whether one’s position or design is correct is significantly reduced when two or more colleagues work together to validate the work being done. What about Artificial Intelligence (AI)? AI does not currently replace human beings (and it probably never will entirely) due to a lack of reasoning and contextual factors. For instance, consider my question about viewing data. The computer gave me the answer it did, because it lacks the context of the world I live in. Without extensive prompting it could take a while to really get it to know what I mean. But teammates probably already knows something about what we are doing without being told, and even if they can't give you the answer directly, they probably can give you a hand honing your questions with more context, Not that I am dismissing AI. Currently, AI serves as another half teammate that can efficiently search and summarize data quickly and help you find answers. But it is nowhere near as efficient as a human expert that can reason that something is right or wrong based on the entire context of a situation. Well, not until you figure out how to ask it the question you really wanted to know. What brought this up? This realization struck me while I was working on a project today. I realized that I no longer had a specific individual I could simply ask, “Is this correct?” or at least, “Where should I look for this information?” As I expand my mind from being a SQL Server-only type programmer and start to consider how PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, and any of the plethora of other data platforms (relational or otherwise), I don't always know how to ask the question in the terms of these other systems. Having someone close to ask some of these questions saves me time, and I can always reciprocate with things that I know. The bottom line: some things are simply better when worked on collaboratively with a team. Louis Davidson (@drsql) Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums | 
