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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)

#21

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…

> When I watched AlphaZero play chess, I was just a tiny bit impressed. I watched it beat the Go grandmaster and I was not very impressed. Then I watched it play Dota 2 -- in which I've sunk several thousand hours -- and holy crap. Wow! It was suddenly terrifying how good it was, because I could judge the nuance of what it was doing

Funny, my game of choice is StarCraft 2 and when I watched AlphaStar beat StarCraft 2 pros I was significantly less impressed than when I watched AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go.

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

#22

Post by nmcela »

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.

As a gamedev, that sentence nearly gave me a heart attack. :)

I get where you are coming from, but the amount of work you can do in 5ms is mindblowing.

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

#23

Post by ianpurton »

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…

> 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 difference.

This is so true.

It's also very difficult to stop as the consultancy gets the project and the client doesn't get to interview the people who actually turn up.

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

#24

Post by 3abiton »

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…

> 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 difference.

The main selling point is that big 4/8/16 have standard process, that does not really work, but gives the impression of "high quality" to clients, who are not technical.

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

#25

Post by swyx »

great article and well supported (loved the tennis example).

i can't help but notice that Cedric (author of commoncog, and a friend) is accumulating a good body of work exploring knowledge and expertise acquisition. is this something that is generically applicable or are we reading convincing-sounding text generated by a very advanced human expertise language model? I guess the only way to know for sure is for Cedric to open up a coaching practice and see the results?

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

#26

Post by 3abiton »

fidotron wrote: post #11

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 t…

Dunning-kruger strikes again

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

#27

Post by jiggawatts »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #15
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…

For reference, I did offer alternative solutions.

> 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.

This is the point of the article, which you appear to have missed.

There's a point where it becomes essentially impossible to articulate the differences to the lay person. Or for that matter, someone actually quite skilled, but not a "master".

It's not a lack of skill on the part of the expert, it's the lack of skill on the part of everybody else.

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

#29

Post by SanderNL »

candiddevmike wrote: post #16

Is expertise still important in the age of ChatGPT?

If anything it’s more important. Without it you cannot separate its confabulation from its useful output.

Knowing when to use what tool, how to do it properly and to what extent takes expertise as well.

Carpenters and craftsmen in general are infinitely more productive with woodworking and related tools than I will ever be. My destiny is assembling IKEA cupboards. The same principle will apply with AI tools. Sure you can whip up something, but a specialist will do it infinitely better in 1/100th of the time with the same tools.

Guess who will be employed to make use of said tools?

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

#30

Post by joshuaissac »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #19
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.

> The people looking for a higher quality product will immediately go for the more expensive product

It is more complicated than that. There is no guarantee that the more expensive wallet is also the higher-quality product. The people looking for a higher-quality product can be classified into those who can measure the quality well (perhaps by observing those minor differences), and those who have to use less effective proxies of quality (like price).

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