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Experts have it easy (2024)

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Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#81

Post by beyarkay »

xlii wrote: post #22

I find the article interesting and well written. There might be some theory crafting but it resonates with my personal experience, especially this: > The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their decisions is what makes it so useful for novices to spend time with experts. I really like spending time with novices, especially if they are truly interested…

(author here) Thanks! this was my first anything published to the internet, glad to see it's been received so well.

> I really like spending time with novices

From reading the various comments about this essay, it seems like there's a pretty sharp divide, some people love spending time with novices, others despise the activity.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#82

Post by pcthrowaway »

joenot443 wrote: post #47

This is a really good article. There's a quality in strong developers which is difficult to select for in an interview but wildly valuable once they're up and running; maybe the best word is "scrappiness". When I interview juniors or interns, one of the questions I like to ask is something like this- "You've got two computer, one Linux one Windows. There's 50gb of files on the Windows machine which need to be moved t…

Pick up the Windows machine and place it on top of the Linux machine. The files are now on the Linux machine.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#83

Post by beyarkay »

edelbitter wrote: post #5

> unguided “water-cooler” interaction This meme needs to stop. Knowledge transfer from experts to novices is way too important to be left to chance. And thanks to pre-pivot StackOverflow we even have considerable data on how much better it can be done, at least for white collar industries. Reducing the effort of experts to give advice, and enlarging the audience benefiting from a singular effort to write it down is o…

(author here) I absolutely agree that knowledge transfer shouldn't be left to chance, and that there should be more consistent processes in place to make sure this happens. But I still think there's something to be gained from experts and novices having a more casual conversation about various topics.

When I was getting started in software, some of the most valuable conversations I had were after a technical meeting, when I could pick a seniors brain on the way out of the room, asking them why XYZ solution was dismissed immediately.

Encouraging frequent and casual conversation between experts & novices is key.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#84

Post by beyarkay »

coolcase wrote: post #26
nottorp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only do structured knowledge transfer you get to transfer whatever the expert thinks they should pass on and at best also what the novice thinks they should learn. Which may or may not be the full expertise.

A good documenter is the novice who just learned. (Maybe the expert should vet it for accuracy)

(author here) Absolutely agree. Another commenter mentioned that sometimes the best mentor is someone slightly better than you, and not some seasoned veteran. You want someone knowledgeable enough to give good (and correct) advice, but not so knowledgeable that they struggle to be comprehensible.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#85

Post by beyarkay »

jeffrallen wrote: post #60
nottorp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only do structured knowledge transfer you get to transfer whatever the expert thinks they should pass on and at best also what the novice thinks they should learn. Which may or may not be the full expertise.

Also, a novice is more ready to learn a lesson on the way back from a dead end than while barreling down towards it.

(author here) This is an interesting point. I hadn't considered it, but I agree. Or maybe to be more specific, I think the novice has some prior that their idea will work, and hearing an expert's disagreement will update their prior somewhat. If the novice has a high respect for the expert, that update will be large enough. But sometimes the novice just has to experience the pain firsthand in order to truly appreciate why something is a bad idea.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#86

Post by beyarkay »

hansvm wrote: post #65
edelbitter wrote: post #5

> unguided “water-cooler” interaction This meme needs to stop. Knowledge transfer from experts to novices is way too important to be left to chance. And thanks to pre-pivot StackOverflow we even have considerable data on how much better it can be done, at least for white collar industries. Reducing the effort of experts to give advice, and enlarging the audience benefiting from a singular effort to write it down is o…

Not really. It's the same reason formal lectures are so much less valuable than one-on-one mentoring. An expert's value doesn't come from a bundle of facts, but from being able to figure out which facts you need to hear right this second given your current background, and figuring out how to present them so that you in particular can apply them. Having a motivating problem to discuss also helps both parties appropria…

(author here) I think there's something to be said for having both (if I allow myself to imagine an unrealistic utopia).

Imagining the distribution of how much benefit novices get out of a scenario, only having the watercooler interactions probably has a high maximum benefit (i.e. there's some expert that loves teaching and puts loads of time into helping novices) but probably also a very low minimum benefit (i.e. there are no experts at the company, or the experts couldn't care less about helping out). So it's the risky scenario, with a high variance.

Only having formal teaching doesn't have nearly as low a minimum (even a lecturer doing the bare minimum is better than no lecturer), but also doesn't have nearly as high a maximum (a high-effort lecturer simply cannot pay attention to each of the 300 students in a lecture hall, no matter how hard they try).

So having the formal teaching raises the minimum, ensuring the worst outcomes are not that bad, and adding in some watercooler interactions raises the maximum, ensuring that high-effort experts are able to converse with interested novices.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#87

Post by beyarkay »

elcritch wrote: post #9
edelbitter wrote: post #5

> unguided “water-cooler” interaction This meme needs to stop. Knowledge transfer from experts to novices is way too important to be left to chance. And thanks to pre-pivot StackOverflow we even have considerable data on how much better it can be done, at least for white collar industries. Reducing the effort of experts to give advice, and enlarging the audience benefiting from a singular effort to write it down is o…

What? No, those free form unguided interactions are very useful for most novices. They're not a replacement for more structured knowledge teansfer, but an important compliment. Sure some novices are just natural talents that can pick up complex material from structured content alone. They're few though. > The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their de…

(author here) I love the graduate student + nobel laureate reference, I had read that study but totally forgot how relevant it is to the essay. Absolutely it hammers home the point that there's something about just spending casual time with experts in a field that's invaluable to novices, regardless of the skill/talent of the novice.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#88

Post by beyarkay »

philipswood wrote: post #11
elcritch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? No, those free form unguided interactions are very useful for most novices. They're not a replacement for more structured knowledge teansfer, but an important compliment. Sure some novices are just natural talents that can pick up complex material from structured content alone. They're few though. > The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their de…

You don't need to wait for AR/VR. For computer work the real space of interaction is currently the screen. Unstructured pair programming for two remotes with a shared screen and audio and chat is a way more effective interaction than most things you could do together at the office. Even better if both of you have two screens - so besides the shared space, you have a separate work area where you can Google things, ask…

(author here) it's a pity that there's no way to emulate an office's "just peer around your screen and ask your colleague" dynamic. Having your video camera always on is too creepy, and constantly being in a voice call with your peers still feels a bit weird.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#89

Post by beyarkay »

hindsightRegret wrote: post #32

One counterpoint I have to this article. Considering expert vs. novice problem-solving: Within their domain, experts leverage highly efficient models. Outside? Rigidity often impedes adaptation. Their ingrained patterns, assets in familiar territory, become cognitive liabilities in the unfamiliar. The novice's counter-intuitive strength lies in a lack of assumptions, fostering the openness to explore without ego.

(author here) I agree that novices have an advantage in that they have few assumptions:

> Something you can do independently (and possibly it’s best done without expert supervision), is exploration of the field. You know nothing, and have no biases about what may or may not be useful. Any time you come across something that feels like it has some depth to it, such as a well-written essay series or a deep technical dive, you need to invest heavily into it. As a novice, your one advantage is that everything is new and nobody expects you to be fast. Because of this, you can afford to spend the time to learn as much as possible.

I'm not sure that it's correct to characterise an expert by the lack of this though. I think it's correlated, but not all experts are so rigid.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#90

Post by skydhash »

thinkingemote wrote: post #34
flysand7 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%, debugging is an absolute joy, especially with niche systems-level kinda of bugs that simply can not be debugged with simple printf's. I had a friend once asking me to help debug a weird issue over discord. We went through some obvious things like are there any other threads running or is there something obviously wrong with the code. We didn't find anything so we went on to the best part -- trying to figure out…

Also love debugging, it's puzzle, pattern matching, evidence gathering, poking around, experimenting, it's using tools, diving into documentation, learning more than whats required to write it and learning about humans and machines and why and how we make mistakes and forgiving these mistakes and fixing the errors. That feeling when spending lots of time to write just one line of code to close that one pesky bug. Are…

Debugging can be a joy when dealing with a single system. Not so much when dealing with things like microservices where every combination has a possible failure scenario related to that bug. And because of the deployment strategy, you can't easily test that combination in isolation. Also no tests for each service, only full integration tests that takes a while to run.

I know distributed systems can be a pain to reason about, but I think every node should be capable of being tested in isolation, at least to be able to partition errors (either the node, or the distributed nature of the system)

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