> There's no way you can be an electrician-plumber-mechanic-doctor-lawyer-IT specialist. That's an interesting list. I agree with your general feeling on this.

> There's no way you can be an electrician-plumber-mechanic-doctor-lawyer-IT specialist. That's an interesting list. I agree with your general feeling on this. But in my case, out of necessity, I have had to become an expert in each of the fields you mention, and many more. By expert I'll say I know more than the average licensed person. The average. I also have cultivated professional relationships with people in each of the categories who are competent and know more than me. Which is a minority of each field. I think that "If you want to hire someone to do a job, you need to know how to do the job yourself." is true in many ways because the average level of competence by specialists is low. I also agree that it's not easily possible to be competent as a very competent specialist in all of these fields. Where we perhaps disagree is that I would say it is possible for an amateur to become above average compared to professionals in all of these fields. In most of these fields I would much rather pay someone to do it. I don't particularly enjoy the work. But paying someone gets me substandard and incompetent work even in licensed fields most of the time, until I know more than the average practitioner. Also when we are talking about a lot of trades, though smart people used to be well represented in them, it's less the case these days. So tradesmen often don't have a lot of sense for diagnosing or doing proper work. A smarter person is going to be able to do a better job, even though he doesn't want to have to do that. But he may have no choice if he wants work done properly. As far as reputation and recommendations I've personally found that seldom works to find the best people. I recognize others experience may differ. The problem is the person doing the recommendation will recommend a relative, friend, or someone they know who does bad work but they don't realize it because they are unable to judge it properly. For a recommendation to be good the recommend-er also has to know enough about the field to identify skilled practitioners. Most people don't know this much unless they are skilled in the field themselves. The best people I've found have been through brute force search techniques of hiring over and over until I find someone that is able to do things well.