There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#91

Post by ekidd » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

goatinaboat wrote: post #20

andersco wrote: post #9

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech. In my mind “tech expert” is about literacy. You may not know the specifics of all technologies but you have the mental toolkit for understanding them conceptually. But it is also about context. If you are the person who people ask for help with tech stuff, well, then you’re an expert, at least in their minds.

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech No one was ever literally all-knowing but tech people never used to be as micro-specialist as is common now. In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. In the early days of Google they probably did have guys who really did understand it all. But no…

In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty.

The last time I looked, a good CS curriculum still teaches people how a half-adder circuit works, how to write code in assembly, the basics of UDP and TCP, how to build a web app, and fundamental algorithms and data structures.

Additionally, students might do a couple of the following: implement a primitive SQL engine, write a simple compiler, program a robot, add features to a kernel, or study introductory machine learning. These are all common undergraduate electives. You don't need to be polymath to switch from debugging packet dumps to writing CSS.

I'm actually a huge fan of good bootcamps, because some people out there will absolutely love coding, and bootcamps give them a chance. But it's perfectly possible to understand computer architecture and networking protocols and React, and a good university CS curriculum should cover many of those topics at an introductory level.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#92

Post by ajmurmann » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

andersco wrote: post #9

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech. In my mind “tech expert” is about literacy. You may not know the specifics of all technologies but you have the mental toolkit for understanding them conceptually. But it is also about context. If you are the person who people ask for help with tech stuff, well, then you’re an expert, at least in their minds.

I think you make an important point that it's about tech literacy. I think the bar is in practice lower. Congress people need to be barely tech literate themselves. They have aids and advisors that should brief them and get them the relevant information for the decision that needs to be made and the questions that need to be asked in hearings.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#93

Post by acheron9383 » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

almost_usual wrote: post #88

mlazos wrote: post #27

This author appears to think that you need to understand the intricate details of a search algorithm, distributed computing, and machine learning before you understand what their general use is? I don’t need to understand how a car engine works before I can understand how to drive or how cars have changed society. The only argument this article proves is that google and Facebook have lowered the bar on journalism so…

Your car engine doesn’t store information about everywhere you go and what your interests are. Your car engine probably doesn’t experience data leaks, social engineering, or 0 day bugs. The argument is Google and Facebook don’t 100% know their data usage and risks and I’d agree that’s true. Complex software systems are impossible to 100% guarantee expected behavior. This is why bug bounties and the security industry…

The metaphor seems apt to me, if anything, we should have and do have a much greater interest in regulation of automotive products, which themselves are absurdly complex. How is a regulator to know about various emissions, chances of explosion/fire, engine longevity and warranties? Engines can kill you with fuel leaks, poor materials engineering, or unknown manufacturing bugs. I'd argue that your car engine is much more likely to harm you in a significant way. Car engines had, and continue to have, albeit at a much lower rate,issues related to these things, and we came up with various bodies to help manage it. The people writing the legislation need to better surround themselves with people to advise them on the topics related to Google and Facebook, that is their job as a representative of their constituents; instead they come to the meeting barely prepared and ask a series of poorly worded and unimaginative questions, showing they didn't ask their aides to do even basic research on their behalf, while Google and Facebook bring Harvard lawyers to their corner.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#94

Post by lordgrenville » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

neohed wrote: post #53

I had an issue with this: "while in graduate school in American Studies, I realized that computer science was a method of understanding much like many others . . . I’d also misunderstood coding as a craft instead of a field of knowledge and inquiry." I agree that computer science is a field of "knowledge and enquiry" (aren't all academic disciplines?) but disagree with his conflation of CS and "coding." Computer scie…

This sentence seems like a bizarre non sequitur. Absent some explanation of how American Studies connects to CS (perhaps this is obvious to American Studiers?), it reads like the equivalent of "while backpacking through Laos, I realised the New York subway system was in urgent need of repair".

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#95

Post by Barrin92 » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

knorker wrote: post #73

That's a really long article to say what we already know: That "expert" means to know in detail a narrow thing. It hasn't been possible to be a true polymath in like 500 years. Surely this isn't news to the author? There's no such thing as "an expert on everything"? Yeah, no shit. It's almost tautology, due to the limitations on human brains and the advancement of science since the renaissance. Another way I think th…

Yes. If you go to one of the first legal definitions of the term expert, that is what you get

"person who, by virtue of special acquired knowledge or experience on a subject, presumably not within the knowledge of men generally, may testify in a court of justice to matters of opinion thereon, as distinguished from ordinary witnesses, who can in general testify only to facts"

Regulators are not experts and they're not meant to be experts, they may consult experts if they require their knowledge. I'm also not sure what the point of the entire discussion is, I hope nobody believes that regulators somehow need to be quantum physicists and physicians and computer scientists and artists at the same time to make judgements about tech or anything else.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#96

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

grayhatter wrote: post #57

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computers are 100% deterministic, from top to bottom. Not in every respect. Concurrency and C's undefined behaviour spring to mind.

It's still deterministic. It doesn't randomly do something different with the exact same IO. Just because it's hard to recreate the exact same state with concurrent processes on a modern CPU doesn't change it's determinism. Also, undefined behavior in C only means a compiler can do what ever it likes. It doesn't make it random. People need to stop pretending UB in C is magic. It's not going to delete your hard disk,…

[deleted]

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#97

Post by FartyMcFarter » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

cblconfederate wrote: post #16

Ha! Imagine writing this about medicine. Computers are 100% deterministic, from top to bottom. Even their effects of society can clearly be tracedback.

Some useful models of computation are deterministic. But modern computer systems are rarely deterministic as a whole (even if some of their components are).

For example, CPUs can change their clock rate in response to temperature. This can make it impossible to trace exact behavior, especially if there's any timing dependent code or complex multi-threading going on.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#98

Post by eropple » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

juped wrote: post #63

tluyben2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While funny, that is a little while ago. What is depressing now is that it became worse but people are not that vocal in public anymore. Many people I encounter say they can do things in days but when hired they really can't (not even close) (and these are seniors with proven experience doing things but just not very fast at all; I cannot figure if it's the frameworks as I know I could do it in days with jquery/lamp…

It's only possible to get hired by anyone (including, probably, by you - how do you select candidates, exactly?) by resume-padding with trendy largely-useless items like kubernetes microservices etc. Be the change you want to see in the market.

I assure you that k8s etc. have not been requirements in any job that I have interviewed for or hired for. Including ones where k8s is in use.

Principles still matter more unless you are in an exclusively bolt-turning role.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#99

Post by nixpulvis » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

Hippocrates wrote: post #75

This is a horribly wrong take. The premise that nobody understands these tech issues at the level needed to address them is not even close to true. In fact, this sounds like an argument one of the luddites in congress would make rather than a tech journalist.

Luddites were mostly concerned with the protection of their livelihoods from the powers of larger producers of equipment at the time. I think we as a society could learn a lot about our situation by looking closer at Ludditism

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#100

Post by Izkata » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

ekidd wrote: post #91

goatinaboat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech No one was ever literally all-knowing but tech people never used to be as micro-specialist as is common now. In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. In the early days of Google they probably did have guys who really did understand it all. But no…

In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. The last time I looked, a good CS curriculum still teaches people how a half-adder circuit works, how to write code in assembly, the basics of UDP and TCP, how to build a web app, and fundamental algorithms and data structures. Additionally, students might do a couple of the follow…

That describes a CS degree heavily biased towards practical application instead of towards theory, like mine was. We only had a couple of the things in your lists.

Anything that involves the physical world went in the engineering degrees - we didn't do circuits, assembly, or programming a robot. Likewise networking I think was an elective, as might have been kernels (though I don't recall that one, and didn't take either of those myself). We did talk about kernels in our systems programming course, but the extent of practical work was things like creating our own malloc and creating a simple shell.

Web apps were in the ITM courses (Information Technology something), which was where people learned specific practical skills and most people doing CS degrees didn't touch - I took one out of curiosity and it was so absurdly low-skill-level: The first assignment was creating mockups for site, then imagine spending the next few months on just HTML and CSS implementing it.

One specific example of the theory-vs-practical-application difference between our CS degrees, we didn't do compilers, we did programming language design. Parsing theory, grammars, and after learning Scheme we used it to implement an interpreter for our own language.