Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022) • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by derbOac » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 12:40 PM UTC

I understand the intent, but this article seems to be arguing for an Emperor's New Clothes scenario where no one can identify the value of something except for a vanishingly small number of people.

It's some economic variant of the tree falling in the forest analogy: if a service has quality but no one can recognize it does it have value?

It strikes me as a recipe for regulatory capture and overcredentialing.

Value ultimately lies in the purchaser, not the producer.

Maybe it depends on the market but this seemed to be arguing for something dangerous to me.

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

#62

Post by yohannesk » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 12:40 PM UTC

bazooka wrote: post #51

ryanklee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

What real life project only involves experts on specific field? Are you working on toy problems? Isn't there cost/benefit analysis to everything? If I understand something well, I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way. If I can't, then I probably lack full grasp of the topic

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

#63

Post by WanderPanda » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 12:41 PM UTC

derbOac wrote: post #61

I understand the intent, but this article seems to be arguing for an Emperor's New Clothes scenario where no one can identify the value of something except for a vanishingly small number of people. It's some economic variant of the tree falling in the forest analogy: if a service has quality but no one can recognize it does it have value? It strikes me as a recipe for regulatory capture and overcredentialing. Value u…

I would go further and say it is not even with the purchaser but with the consumer (who by definition "destroys" that value)

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

#64

Post by heyoni » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 12:47 PM UTC

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…

That was my exact reaction too. There’s a reason python and other “slow” languages are dominating. Very few industries require that kind speed, and even fewer require it at the cost of simplifying code or architecture.

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

#65

Post by girvo » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 12:53 PM UTC

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…

In my experience the CTO got to be CTO because they’re friends with the CEO, the board, etc, rather than their own technical ability being superior than the seniors/leads under them. And that goes for me too, when I was CTO. It’s a position, it doesn’t have any inherent guarantee of ability to avoid optimising the irrelevant: some will, some won’t.

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

#66

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 12:54 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by shadowsun7 » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 12:55 PM UTC

Author here. Previous time this was on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930985

As an update, I temporarily relocated to a different city and spent four months training Judo for five hours every day and have since reached the vocab point for the sport. That experiment was covered here: https://commoncog.com/expertise-acceleration-experiment-judo... and https://commoncog.com/mental-strength-judo-life/

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

#68

Post by xyzelement » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 1:00 PM UTC

cgeier wrote: post #59

xyzelement wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// 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).

I agree that's ideal but probably wouldn't expect a latency optimization expert to understand my business well enough to do that and that's fine. But I -would- expect them to say something on the level of: "this is the kinda latency that will prevent you from ever moving to a cloud desktop" or "at this level of latency, you are going to suffer X second delay every time you interact with a complex web app like Jira" or "you are an HFT firm and I know that your competitors are at about 1% of your latency." Then let your client decide if this is something that matters to them. Quite different than "wow the CTO is too dumb to understand my genius"

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

#69

Post by thrw4wy-d2 » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

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…

> Then I watched it play Dota 2 -- in which I've sunk several thousand hours -- and holy crap

Fascinating. I’ve never professionally worked in what it sounds like you do, so I was moderately agreeing with you until this.

I’ve played Dota likely as long as you in addition to playing at a semi pro level (placing well in a couple official pro qualifying tournaments as well as playing pubs with the players the AI played against) and I couldn’t disagree more.

It was impressive, but it’s main advantage came from its inhuman reaction times. They added some buffer but still didn’t account for 5 players working in perfect unison. That kind of coordination is an enormous advantage in a game like Dota. I left roughly feeling like I do now about AI - very impressive, but way over hyped and only sold to people that don’t truly get Dota.

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

#70

Post by nativecoinc » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

There are some teachers of Samatha meditation, a Buddhist concentration meditation, that teach that you at any point are meditating at one of ten stages. This is both about skill as well as about factors like how agitated your mind is in general. And these stages seem to have very well-defined descriptions: for example one stage might be differentiated from the previous one by overcoming drowsiness. This is very helpful since some people teach meditation by just telling you how to do it but not (in fact sometimes actively avoiding) how you can evaluate where you are and how you are doing. Then the practice becomes just about “being present” and other slogans that might be wholly non-actionable.

It’s also very difficult to protest this kind of approach (edit: the non-goal approach) since merely mentioning things like "goal" or "evaluation" will trigger someone’s knee-jerk you’re-doing-it-wrong reaction, even though what they practice might be completely different to what you are doing or trying to achieve.