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

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

#31

Post by VoodooJuJu »

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’ve noticed that in nearly every skill tree I’ve climbed, there comes a point where you begin to notice certain nuances of skill that novices not only don’t notice, but that you cannot articulate using the commonly accepted vocabulary of the skill.

I've encountered this, and what works is re-framing it in terms they'll understand. Things that are universally understood are: time, money, and competition.

In this case, the "micro" and "milli" pitch is technical minutiae and is not what I'm referring to when I say "time". These are more effective frames:

>If we do this, it will save/cost us months/years/dollars...

>If we do this, the performance hit will knock out our competitive advantage, which we'll have to make up for it with something else, which will cost time/money...

>This thing is insufficient for our customer's needs, which will cause our customers to seek out competitors, which will cause us to lose money...

>This thing is too complex and will require additional training and is error-prone, which will cost us time and money...

In addition to those, for every decision you refute, recommend a superior alternative, and again, frame it in terms of time and money.

Now, this won't be a one-sided thing, you'll likely get into a conversation, and a lot of "why's" will try to extract that technical minutiae answer from you, which you might want to mention at some point in the exchange, but don't give it up easily, and do not emphasize it. Make sure you continue to emphasize the more convincing frames: time and money.

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

#32

Post by candiddevmike »

SanderNL wrote: post #29
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…

Probably not the best comparison, as a carpenter or craftsmen can't tell a LLM something to build X out of wood and have it come out mostly OK (yet?). Anyone can tell ChatGPT to write some code to do X, not just expert programmers. It may not be perfect, but it's only going to get better, no?

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

#33

Post by thesumofall »

jiggawatts wrote: post #27
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But is this really the point of the article? The article argues that it is difficult to identify expertise. However, the situation you describe is one where (if I read you correctly) not your expertise was questioned but your recommendation. If there wasn’t any tangible difference between the CTO’s and your suggested course of action on a metric that he as a customer cared about, then maybe his proposal was indeed the better one? And yes, probably he didn’t care about the exact latencies in the system, but he would probably care about customer retention, system availability, etc.?

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

#34

Post by ZephyrBlu »

jiggawatts wrote: post #27
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have been familiar with the author and this article for a long time.

> 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

This is a very poor frame of reference. It's not other people's fault they cannot understand the value you provide, it's your fault.

The thing that tends to bother engineers is that articulating your value (I.e. sales and marketing) is generally orthogonal to your key competencies.

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

#36

Post by BiteCode_dev »

candiddevmike wrote: post #16

Is expertise still important in the age of ChatGPT?

This is a good question, and I don't think you should be downvoted.

It is important for several reasons:

- As other commenters pointed out, filtering, adapting and integrating ChatGPT output has a better ROI with experts.

- An expert will know the ROI of using ChatGPT, including on the long run, and can assess if it's worth it or not. A non expert will use it for as long as it works, and can hit a wall of technical debts accumulated from the GPT usage that will now sunk the cost of the entire operation.

- Expertise comes with a lot of implicit knowledge that ChatGPT doesn't access to.

- ChatGPT doesn't learn from mistakes in the way humans does. And humans don't share the mistakes they made as much. And experts have made all the mistakes.

- ChatGPT tries very hard not to not be opinionated, or to have an opinion that will offend the least amount of people. IRL though, you want opinionated takes.

There are, however, many situations where being an expert to benefit from ChatGPT is no required. I also find that sometimes being an expert prevents me from getting the most of ChatGPT, because I stick to what I know instead of embracing novel workflows. I have a friend coding things with repeated ChatGPT copy/paste loops over days, and they have done great things with it.

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

#37

Post by jiggawatts »

thesumofall wrote: post #33
jiggawatts wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But is this really the point of the article? The article argues that it is difficult to identify expertise. However, the situation you describe is one where (if I read you correctly) not your expertise was questioned but your recommendation. If there wasn’t any tangible difference between the CTO’s and your suggested course of action on a metric that he as a customer cared about, then maybe his proposal was indeed th…

I'm finding this entire line of discussion incredibly curious because not only does it confirm my original argument and the that of the article, but it hammers the point home.

Everything you've just said is gibberish to a master.

It's like making a straight-faced argument that setting the speed limit to 1 mph on a motorway might make perfect sense, and the traffic engineer is actually at fault for not making it clear that this is nonsense.

I get that you don't see the ridiculousness of 50 microseconds vs 5 milliseconds, but that's the point.

You don't see it, and you start making random arguments untethered from reality.

The fact that you are blind to it, unlike being blind to 1 mph vs 65 mph is the entire point.

You may have driven thousands of hours. You have don't have thousands of hours of network performance tuning expertise.

Both of us wouldn't be able to even begin to understand the complaints Ayrton Senna might make about how the steering is too "crunchy" at the extremes or that the brake strength imbalance is shifting the car about.

There's levels of expertise, and if two people are too far apart, meaningful communication between them becomes impossible.

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

#38

Post by marginalia_nu »

jiggawatts wrote: post #14
marginalia_nu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We can absolutely go into a long side-discussion about units and how most imperial units are also clearly just a constant-factor away from SI units and nobody would argue they are the same unit, but I don't think any of that actually matters. It's semantics.

When you are an expert, nearly by definition the average person you're talking to is less well read on the subject than you, the expert. Because of this, it's extremely important to be able to communicate with clarity and patience.

Your expertise doesn't matter if you can't make yourself understood, and it's not reasonable to expect people around you to share your expertise, so you need to adapt the message.

Communication in general is easier the fewer concepts you invoke. In almost all situations it's better to be mostly correct and well understood than to be perfectly correct and not understood at all.

Even if you can expect most people to have an understanding of SI units, far fewer will have an intuition for them (because they aren't working with them daily). Everyone has a basic intuition for big numbers though, so if you want to say "this is bad", show them a big number; the bigger the better.

It can still be correct and make a well founded argument, but presentation matters a lot more than you'd think for convincing someone. In increasing order of likelihood it will convince anyone:

The new solution adds a 15ms latency, whereas our usual requests have a 2us latency.

The new solution adds a 15ms latency, whereas our usual requests have 0.002ms latency.

The new solution is a factor 7.5e3 slower than the existing solution, which has a 2 microsecond latency.

The new solution is 7,500 times slower than the existing solution, which has a 2 microsecond latency.

The new solution is 75,000% slower than the existing solution, which has a 2 microsecond latency.

What is said is basically identical in each version, but the presentation puts an increasing emphasis on just how big a difference this is by literally showing a big number.

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

#39

Post by jiggawatts »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #21
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…

You should be more impressed knowing that that AlphaStar was handicapped. Its clicking was rate-limited and its inputs were delayed by something like 150 milliseconds to make it "fair" for the humans.

If you remove those limits, it would absolutely wipe the floor with the twitching corpse of any human player.

I saw it play Warcraft 2 without the limiters, and it was just ridiculous. It would dance the units around and keep using them with 1 hp left for many minutes and then heal them back up juuuuust enough to take exactly one hit from an enemy.

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

#40

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jiggawatts wrote: post #27
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds like you cannot convince them based on merit, because they simply do not understand you and the language you speak. It sounds like you need to change tack, convince them you're an expert in $field without using words and prhases from $field; keep your secrets and knowledge, feed them some generic drivel. Maybe hire someone that can help you with your sales pitch.
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