Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

commoncog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 177 posts

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

#51

Post by bazooka »

ryanklee wrote: post #41
jiggawatts wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Really does sound like you have difficulties with communicating your points that do not have to do with external factors, but with your actual skill at communicating. Experts manage to successfully argue fine points to laypersons all the time to non experts in every field. You are coming across as deflective.

He is not deflective. Your comments are rather dense. The orthodoxy of ‘changing frame’ and ‘putting it in a language they understand’ is layman drivel. It is not always possible to do so and it is overwhelmingly untractable if you eskew the fundamental reasons in a discussion with a non-expert that insists on technical justification and just doesn’t take your cookie-cutter time/money/competitive advantage talking points and can’t provide you with specifics that can be quantified.

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

#52

Post by xyzelement »

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 is a disaster for a veritable smorgasbord of upcoming projects. It just. Would. Not. Sink. In.

Does this company do something where this latency would be noticeable? Can you give an example of business impact that would result from it?

If you can, why don't you? If you can't, then sounds like it doesn't matter.

The CTO didn't get to be the CTO by optimizing the irrelevant.

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

#54

Post by someweirdperson »

hardware2win wrote: post #13

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

But that's only for code that's painted using the mouse, not for code typed on the keyboard.

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

#55

Post by marginalia_nu »

Attrecomet wrote: post #7
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.

This is beautiful, thank you Edit: aww, ninja edit takes away all the fun :/

> Edit: aww, ninja edit takes away all the fun :/

You know I have a degree in theoretical physics so I really should get this stuff right, but before I've had my morning coffee all bets are off :P

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

#56

Post by yohannesk »

jiggawatts wrote: post #37
thesumofall wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I were to guess, I would say an average 4th grader knows the difference between nano, milli or micro seconds. Understanding the magnitude might not be the problem for the CTO. But why should the CTO care? How does it translate to his business requirements? That's your job to explain, no?

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

#57

Post by kashunstva »

This relates closely to Anders Ericsson's theory of expert performance through deliberate practice. The article discusses the role of nuanced domain-specific vocabulary to describe elements of expertise before pivoting to subsume it all under the rubric of _models_. This is exactly how Ericsson sees deliberate practice working - by building extraordinarily detailed and nuanced neurocognitive models and being able to draw on them readily (and often unconsciously) in performance.

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

#58

Post by lapcat »

The problem with the author's tennis anecdote about Roger Federer's 2017 career resurgence is that in reality it had more to do with the top player Novak Djokovic's elbow injury than with Federer's backhand.

"In 2017, Djokovic suffered from an elbow injury that weakened his results until the 2018 Wimbledon Championships, where he won the title while ranked No. 21 in the world." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novak_Djokovic#Career_statisti...

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

#59

Post by cgeier »

xyzelement wrote: post #52
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 is a disaster for a veritable smorgasbord of upcoming projects. It just. Would. Not. Sink. In. Does this company do something where this latency would be noticeable? Can you give an example of business impact that would result from it? If you can, why don't you? If you can't, then sounds lik…

Ideally, estimate the business values in local currency (and be able to defend those estimates).

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

#60

Post by brookst »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #34
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…

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 genera…

I see this so often: engineers who think it’s demeaning to explain deeply technical things in business terms, so they refuse. Like it’s somehow noble to only speak one language.
Post reply on HN