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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)

#141

Post by Cipater »

nradov wrote: post #136
xyzelement wrote: post #132

// Customers tends not to be experts. So after a certain level of skill has been achieved, any improvements that are made through experience are invisible to the people you’re selling to. The relevant question is - does it matter? The Formula 1 pit crew is more expert than the mechanics at the Toyota dealership in ways I can't appreciate - but does it matter for my Highlander's oil change? The answer might be "Yes, t…

F1 pit crew members are highly trained athletes who specialize in fast tire changes. Many of them are recruited from other sports based on strength, speed, and agility. They often have no real experience as automotive technicians. F1 teams do have world class mechanics but most of them aren't part of the pit crews.

>Many of them are recruited from other sports based on strength, speed, and agility.

This is not true at all. F1 pit crews are mechanics who have worked with cars in other motorsport racing series/feeder series and worked their way up to an F1 team.

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

#142

Post by dilyevsky »

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…

> Furthermore, modern software management practice doesn’t want this because it wants replaceable cogs

In my mind that was always just an excuse to hire as many people as possible to grow their org and get promoted to n+1. But hey it worked with 0% rates!

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

#144

Post by ianmcgowan »

xyzelement wrote: post #132

// Customers tends not to be experts. So after a certain level of skill has been achieved, any improvements that are made through experience are invisible to the people you’re selling to. The relevant question is - does it matter? The Formula 1 pit crew is more expert than the mechanics at the Toyota dealership in ways I can't appreciate - but does it matter for my Highlander's oil change? The answer might be "Yes, t…

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 interesting.

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

#145

Post by swyx »

shawntan wrote: post #118
swyx wrote: post #25

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…

great substack and podcast (love the guests you have on) i can't help but notice that Swyx (author of latent space) is accumulating a body of work exploring LLMs and covering AI progress. is this something that is analysis by an expert or are we reading convincing-sounding text generated by a very advanced AI hype language model? I guess the only way to know for sure is for Swyx to train an LLM or do deep learning re…

lmao.. not either of those things but i do have something smol i am working on

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

#146

Post by xyzelement »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #144
xyzelement wrote: post #132

// Customers tends not to be experts. So after a certain level of skill has been achieved, any improvements that are made through experience are invisible to the people you’re selling to. The relevant question is - does it matter? The Formula 1 pit crew is more expert than the mechanics at the Toyota dealership in ways I can't appreciate - but does it matter for my Highlander's oil change? The answer might be "Yes, t…

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 they need and what that looks like.

The line from the article that I cited is the other dynamic - where the client doesn't know what they need. You're right that might be because they are a low level client and don't actually need your expertise (what you mentioned) but it may also be the case that they do badly need you but can't recognize it because of your relative difference in levels.

In general, the higher your level, the more likely it is that even otherwise high-level people will not understand the nuance of what you can bring to them. In that case, there's the sales process that should kick in, and by sales I simply mean helping the client see that they have a problem and that they would be much better off if that problem was solved, and that you're a rare breed who can do it.

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

#147

Post by bitwize »

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…

Some people are just more cut out to study something intently than to reproduce. They leave other things to the future besides descendants.

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

#148

Post by Justsignedup »

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…

Expertise makes sense in larger teams and companies. The smaller you are the more one person has to do. The larger ypu are the more you can afford to have a few people who are absolute experts of a small section but can't make a project complete end to end. But at a large enough company it doesn't matter.

If you have 10 engineers, you need generalists.if you have 1000 engineers, generalists generally are smart people who are potential experts, but not really that useful.

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

#149

Post by someweirdperson »

taeric wrote: post #117
someweirdperson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 two different things: The model of the real world to allow testing and for the implementation of the solution in a graphical language. Of course developers in those environments are Klingons like we all are, no real effort for tests, and only the graphical solution remains. But it is perceived as if it had all the positive attributes of a solution tested in a simulated reality. And therefore something modelled is better, because it is modelled.

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

#150

Post by jiggawatts »

darkerside wrote: post #50
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…

Isn't it possible that you may not understand the CTO's priorities? Security is clearly essential to him, and performance is essential to you. I don't doubt there are other ways to satisfy both criteria, but frankly, it just doesn't sound like the CTO cared about those milliseconds.

That came up too. The security aspect of the product does less than nothing: not only does it fail to encrypt data end-to-end, it uses public ip addresses for both the control and data plane. Those public endpoints had an unauthenticated RCE vulnerability recently.

It’s a staggeringly bad product and it blew my mind now it was impossible to convince anyone of this.

We used pictures, for crying out loud. We did all the things everyone here has been helpfully suggesting. Talking about business consequences (dire), costs (enormous), risks (massive), etc…

The response was: “the sales guy from the vendor assured me it’s all fine. This is just your opinion.”

The causal chain of a->b->c was just not sinking in.

The CTO he could not judge anyone’s expertise not just mine — he also couldn’t judge the lack of expertise by the vendor and their sales team.

So he chose based on who has the nicer suit, the shiniest smile, etc…

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