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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)

#151

Post by Enginerrrd »

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…

I actually think ageism is a huge component of this.

In classical engineering fields, experience was highly valued. In some it still is. In civil engineering, no 24 year old will be able to bullshit their way into senior level roles. It just doesn't happen. The senior guys get more and more valuable. A big part of that is that it's very hard to bullshit your way through that field without at least 6-8 years of experience, and by then you'll hopefully have been humbled enough not to try and bullshit it.

I think missteps and mistakes hit differently when someone traceably stamps their name on a finished product and takes personal liability for it in perpetuity.

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

#153

Post by jononor »

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…

So maybe the term scale is more correct than unit. But more importantly, is the advise useful or not?

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

#154

Post by taeric »

someweirdperson wrote: post #149
taeric wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what you mean? Code is very much a symbolic modeling of a problem domain.

There are people who consider software written, I mean painted, or as they say modelled, in the language of e.g. Simulink to be of higher value than other representations of code. The reason for this is probably different use of the same terms. Some code might be tested within an implementation of a model of the real environment. That is a frequent use-case used to sell graphical languages. The term model is used for…

I think this is still doing it a disservice. You don't test a code with a model of the real environment. You execute the code, which was modeling something.

Consider, "F=ma" is a mathematical model relating force to mass and acceleration. You can test this by dropping several things each from the same height and seeing that the force linearly increases based on the mass of what you are dropping. Similarly, you could test the model by accelerating something to a halt at different speeds and seeing how much force is imparted into it.

Is that not a "model" because it is not necessarily graphical?

So, similarly, much CRUD software can be seen as modeling different agents in an overall system and what happens when they interact in certain ways.

Edit: I want to add that I think I see where you are coming from. Many treatments of graphical models like to hold them up as a special form of modeling.

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

#155

Post by ianmcgowan »

xyzelement wrote: post #146
ianmcgowan wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is when reaching higher levels of expertise is not to try and convince existing customers to move up the ladder with you, it's that you need to find an entirely new set of customers who need that level of expertise and appreciate the difference. It's not about explaining - there's a quantum leap between levels. It might be trite, but as a contractor walking my rate up over 10 years, I found it inter…

I agree on "forget your existing low level customers" and I think you're hitting on one of the growth paths but there's another one. The path you are hitting on implies the client/employer already knows what they need and are gatekeeping on it. It's great to be able to get past those gates - ie, if you've grown yourself into a FAANG-caliber engineer, go interview at Google, but in this case Google already knows what…

That's a good point, and the sales education process is definitely important. It's a fine line between "let's step back and look at your actual pain points" and "what else can I upsell you on while I have your attention?", that customers are very wary of crossing.

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

#156

Post by nonameiguess »

xyzelement wrote: post #71

Not directly related to the article but I had two amusing encounters with expertise recently. I sat next to an Econ professor (at an Ivy) on a flight. I told him I had worked at a hedge fund, and he was like "wow, I could never put myself in a situation where my living depended on my economic theories being right." A good friend of mine is a kinda-famous evolutionary biologist. He's in his mid-40s now, unmarried and…

Unlike you, an evolutionary biologist knows that if enough of his siblings and cousins have children, the probability is very high that most of his genes have been passed on even if he wasn't the one to do it. Also, only 50% of your own get passed on per child, so it's entirely possible more of your genes were passed on by other people even if you have a child or two.

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

#157

Post by uoaei »

yohannesk wrote: post #56
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…

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?

If I were to guess, your child is attending Palo Alto High School when the next school year begins.

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

#159

Post by pvaldes »

xyzelement wrote: post #71

Not directly related to the article but I had two amusing encounters with expertise recently. I sat next to an Econ professor (at an Ivy) on a flight. I told him I had worked at a hedge fund, and he was like "wow, I could never put myself in a situation where my living depended on my economic theories being right." A good friend of mine is a kinda-famous evolutionary biologist. He's in his mid-40s now, unmarried and…

I have met several paleontologists and no one were able to fossilize properly. There are a lot of fake experts in science, it seems.

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

#160

Post by jiggawatts »

mgkimsal wrote: post #79
brookst wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> engineers who think it’s demeaning to explain deeply technical things in business terms, so they refuse I can, and have, explained 'deeply technical things' in 'business terms'. And people understood. Then made a bad/poor/wrong choice anyway, because... "well... all those things you're saying might happen, they might not. Or... it may not happen for months or years, and we already committed to date X for project Y"…

My equivalent of this was finding a brand new SAN array had been formatted wrong. It was nearly empty and unused so it would have been a 5-minute job to format 99% of it and shuffle the in-use 1% around so that the rest can be fixed too.

Both the storage vendor tech and I vehemently argued for solving this immediately but were told to “do it later”.

I pointed out that “later” would be when it is full and has 10K production users using it 24/7. Hence any reformatting would be a six-month project requiring additional kit for the scratch space needed. Not to mention the risk!

I was wrong. It took 12 months.

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