It’s been 4 months since I started work at Fog Creek Software, and boy have I learned a lot. Among the things I have learned are:

• Designers ain’t got nothing on engineers when it comes to “agile.”
• People can always tell when you are trying to impress them.
• You can practice foaming milk for lattes with water and a little bit of dish soap.

But the most important thing I have learned, and am still learning, has to do with the difference between knowledge and experience.

Turns out, four months out, I’m still reeling from The SVA IxD Experience (that should be the name of a rock opera). All those team projects. All that thesis angst. All that worrying about the future compacted into two frenzied years. And all that freakin’ knowledge.

School gives you knowledge, that much is obvious. But if your school is SVA, it also tries to give you Real World Experience. All those design briefs and presentation skills and late-night hyper-managerial strategizing sessions (a.k.a. whining about how much work we have to do). Not to mention the endless stream of Tweetable design adages. It was all so convincingly experiential that I mistook it for actual experience.

Knowledge, turns out, is not the same thing as experience.

Knowledge is always filtered through the lens of whoever imparts it. No matter how rigorous the curriculum or careful the learner, the parts that don’t fit into a cohesive narrative tend to get conveniently left out. And that means knowledge rarely ends up being as subtle and nuanced as it should be. It paints with broad, bold strokes that are easy to commit to memory. And in the end, you’re looking at things through a telescope. Even if the focus is clear and sharp, you’re still thousands of miles away.

And then, when you actually do land on the moon, you realize it is nothing like what you’d imagined.

Take all the musings I had done for my thesis, for example. After all those books, lectures, workshops, symposia, and debates with teachers and classmates, I thought I had the product development process all figured out. It was simply a matter of having a steady vision, tempering that with empathy for your audience, and then releasing fast and early. Armed thusly to the teeth with wise sayings and useful rules-of-thumb, I launched into my new career as interaction designer at (probably) the world’s most meritocratic, engineering-driven software firm ever. And it was here that I learned that everything I know has an asterisk after it.

Having vision is important, but so is co-owning it with your team. Empathy as a word is nice but it can collide with business objectives and technical realities. And there are a thousand variations on “fast and early.” A company that runs on engineers can take that to an extreme, which has its own faults and merits. And even if you feel like things are going off kilter, they are actually right on track (or vice versa).

Day by day, week by week, I’m slowly getting used to life on the moon. I’m filling in the gaps of understanding with detailed first-hand sketches. Being a direct observer is a lot tougher than reading a book where everything make sense. There are plenty of contradictions and equally good options you can’t choose between. Sometimes there is a sore lack of reason. “Why do we do things this way?” “Because it’s how we’ve always done it, but also because we haven’t had the time, but also because of the nature of the product…” The right answer isn’t simple, and there are a million of them anyway.

Experience.

Of course, school was an experience, too. But it’s an experience of school, not of your actual career. Any university brochure that tells you otherwise is lying to you. It can do things to prepare you for things to come by filling your head with rough outlines. But then it’s up to you to fill in all the gory details, the vibrant hues, and the subtle shading.

Then, as soon as the ink dries, that experience ossifies into knowledge, and you start afresh with new experiences. Observe, zoom in, clarify, deepen. Like a gorgeously infinite fractal, the process never ends. There is no limit to the fidelity of experience.

Better make sure your inkpot is full.