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Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

commoncog.com

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Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#11

Post by fidotron »

There is clearly a major problem with this in SV. A lot of people seem to confuse confidence with expertise, and fail to grasp that a scary proportion of the time the individual is so confident because they don’t understand the problems with what they are doing.

Furthermore, modern software management practice doesn’t want this because it wants replaceable cogs. If you can recognize expertise you have to appreciate that teams where everyone is good at everything are nonsensical, and that you need actual balanced mixes of personalities and specialists, which makes hiring a far harder problem. As such recognizing expertise is very much not the order of the day.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#12

Post by bryanrasmussen »

hardware2win wrote: post #4
jiggawatts wrote: post #2

This is an extremely important article to read for professionals of all sorts, not just freelancers. It's an issue that I struggle with nearly daily. I can't convince customers to pay me what I'm worth, because they can't judge my true value. Meanwhile, they'll happily pay Deloitte or Accenture 3x as much as what I charge, and then take the misguided ramblings of a junior-sold-as-senior at face value, not knowing the…

>. I just could not make him understand that 5 milliseconds of additional latency in the era where microseconds are an eternity Context matters, not everywhere 5ms more makes difference.

I felt the context was really far down the stack, so services that lots of other services would be depending on was how I read it. The places I want fast, high volume and never failing cause so much depends on a red wheelbarrow.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#13

Post by hardware2win »

This is why arguing with people from industry and reading a lot is very useful, because it allows you to build your nomenclature

In software world such a word for me was "modeling"

It no longer was "coding", "programming", I started modeling real world

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#14

Post by jiggawatts »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #9
nooby12345 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A factor of 1000 actually

Hmm, I'm clearly not awake enough to SI. But the point still stands. Don't mix units.

The lack of expertise here is confirming the point of the article.

I'm not mixing units.

Milliseconds and microseconds are both measured in units of seconds.

The milli- and micro- prefixes are orders of magnitude. They're scales, not units.

When a scientist starts talking about measurements accurate to attoseconds, I sit up and take notice.

The number in front doesn't make a difference. It's the "atto" that raises my eyebrows.

Back to computing:

I had a debate here with someone who claimed that 128-bit floats are required for some chip layout codes. I questioned that, because a 32-bit number can subdivide the side-length of a chip down to sub-atomic resolution, and a 64-bit float can model the wiggles of the hadrons making up the atomic nuclei!

To some people, 128-bit sounds "twice as good as 64-bit".

To experts, it's... umm... a sign you've made a mistake.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#15

Post by ZephyrBlu »

jiggawatts wrote: post #2

This is an extremely important article to read for professionals of all sorts, not just freelancers. It's an issue that I struggle with nearly daily. I can't convince customers to pay me what I'm worth, because they can't judge my true value. Meanwhile, they'll happily pay Deloitte or Accenture 3x as much as what I charge, and then take the misguided ramblings of a junior-sold-as-senior at face value, not knowing the…

It sounds like you were just telling the CTO "this is wrong" instead of offering an alternative solution?

If that's the case it's not surprising it didn't sink in. You're just giving him another problem.

> I've spent my career performance tuning, but then how do I explain this to people who think a 60-second timeout is a performance problem best solved by buying another million dollars worth of kit?

I'm surprised you've spent your career doing this and you still haven't figured out how to get people to listen to you.

Making your work legible to others feels as important as the work itself.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#17

Post by verve_rat »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #3
jiggawatts wrote: post #2

This is an extremely important article to read for professionals of all sorts, not just freelancers. It's an issue that I struggle with nearly daily. I can't convince customers to pay me what I'm worth, because they can't judge my true value. Meanwhile, they'll happily pay Deloitte or Accenture 3x as much as what I charge, and then take the misguided ramblings of a junior-sold-as-senior at face value, not knowing the…

> To some people, "micro" and "milli" sound the same To be fair, it almost is. Both units are used to talk about times of about the same size. Using both in the same sentence is like mixing meters and feet. It's much clearer to say e.g. 1500us vs 3us; or 1.5ms vs 0.003ms. Don't mix units when making a comparison.

I whole heartedly disagree. Micrometers and millimetres are very, very different and that should be obvious to anyone that uses grams and kgs, or meters and km everyday. Microseconds and milliseconds are obviously different orders of magnitude, that's sort of the whole point of SI prefixes.

That CTO is just doesn't sound qualified for the job.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#18

Post by jiggawatts »

hardware2win wrote: post #4
jiggawatts wrote: post #2

This is an extremely important article to read for professionals of all sorts, not just freelancers. It's an issue that I struggle with nearly daily. I can't convince customers to pay me what I'm worth, because they can't judge my true value. Meanwhile, they'll happily pay Deloitte or Accenture 3x as much as what I charge, and then take the misguided ramblings of a junior-sold-as-senior at face value, not knowing the…

>. I just could not make him understand that 5 milliseconds of additional latency in the era where microseconds are an eternity Context matters, not everywhere 5ms more makes difference.

At the core of a data centre, between VMs, it always makes a difference. An enormous one.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#19

Post by dumpsterdiver »

jiggawatts wrote: post #2

This is an extremely important article to read for professionals of all sorts, not just freelancers. It's an issue that I struggle with nearly daily. I can't convince customers to pay me what I'm worth, because they can't judge my true value. Meanwhile, they'll happily pay Deloitte or Accenture 3x as much as what I charge, and then take the misguided ramblings of a junior-sold-as-senior at face value, not knowing the…

If two nearly identical wallets (very minor, but noticeable differences) are placed on a counter and one is significantly more expensive... how would you expect those wallets to sell?

I would expect both of them to sell out. The people looking for a higher quality product will immediately go for the more expensive product, and the remaining wallets would sell to people who just need a wallet.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#20

Post by maccard »

chaxor wrote: post #5
marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To some people, "micro" and "milli" sound the same To be fair, it almost is. Both units are used to talk about times of about the same size. Using both in the same sentence is like mixing meters and feet. It's much clearer to say e.g. 1500us vs 3us; or 1.5ms vs 0.003ms. Don't mix units when making a comparison.

In the era of Electron, most things take minutes anyway, so milliseconds is an upgrade.

The reason things take minutes is because people ignore order of magnitude diffences when they're insignificant, (it doesn't matter if X takes 10ms instead of 0.1ms), and then over time someone builds on that and makes the same assumption (it doesn't matter if it takes 100ms, when it could take 1ms, followed by it doesn't matter if it takes 10s). Avoiding these order of magnitude differencdz early on is the best way to ensure you don't end up with a SPA that takes 15 seconds to populate a list with 20 items in it.
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