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This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech. In my mind “tech expert” is about literacy. You may not know the specifics of all

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech. In my mind “tech expert” is about literacy. You may not know the specifics of all technologies but you have the mental toolkit for understanding them conceptually. But it is also about context. If you are the person who people ask for help with tech stuff, well, then you’re an expert, at least in their minds.

goatinaboat 6y ago
This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech No one was ever literally all-knowing but tech people never used to be as micro-specialist as is common now. In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. In the early days of Google they probably did have guys who really did understand it all. But not any more.
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  They still exist in massive numbers. Jesus. It's not _that_ hard.
- ekidd 6y ago
  In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. The last time I looked, a good CS curriculum still teaches people how a half-adder circuit works, how to write code in assembly, the basics of UDP and TCP, how to build a web app, and fundamental algorithms and data structures. Additionally, students might do a couple of the following: implement a primitive SQL engine, write a simple compiler, program a robot, add features to a kernel, or study introductory machine learning. These are all common undergraduate electives. You don't need to be polymath to switch from debugging packet dumps to writing CSS. I'm actually a huge fan of good bootcamps, because some people out there will absolutely love coding, and bootcamps give them a chance. But it's perfectly possible to understand computer architecture and networking protocols and React, and a good university CS curriculum should cover many of those topics at an introductory level.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    That describes a CS degree heavily biased towards practical application instead of towards theory, like mine was. We only had a couple of the things in your lists. Anything that involves the physical world went in the engineering degrees - we didn't do circuits, assembly, or programming a robot. Likewise networking I think was an elective, as might have been kernels (though I don't recall that one, and didn't take either of those myself). We did talk about kernels in our systems programming course, but the extent of practical work was things like creating our own malloc and creating a simple shell. Web apps were in the ITM courses (Information Technology something), which was where people learned specific practical skills and most people doing CS degrees didn't touch - I took one out of curiosity and it was so absurdly low-skill-level: The first assignment was creating mockups for site, then imagine spending the next few months on just HTML and CSS implementing it. One specific example of the theory-vs-practical-application difference between our CS degrees, we didn't do compilers, we did programming language design. Parsing theory, grammars, and after learning Scheme we used it to implement an interpreter for our own language.
    - ekidd 6y ago
      I feel like I ought to defend the honor of my school's theoreticians. :-) Their CS program had two theory-heavy courses. In the harder of the two, the homework worked out to 10 pages/week of proofs written in LaTeX. Honors students could also take a functional programming course early on, where they usually got to write a metacircular evaluator. The same CS program also had a software engineering course that required a 5-student team to spend half a term building a group project. (Teams were picked by the professor, for that real-world feel.) This usually required a UI, which meant that we got to learn Motif or web programming or something. This has always seemed like a sensible way to organize a CS curriculum: Everyone needs to write proofs, and everyone needs to write code. Then you can throw in kernels or networking as electives.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
I agree, and will add: An expert in any field must also be well connected so they know who to call / ask / refer to when they don’t know how to proceed.
camillomiller 6y ago
Agreed. I would add ability to do effective and applicable research.
sriku 6y ago
The writeup is not so much about the semantics of the words, but more about the fact that there are so many moving parts designed by diverse teams that no one individual (or even team) has a complete enough understanding of the whole that's sufficient to predict it's consequences on society in relation to its values.
- mcrad 6y ago
  I find it ironic that many are refuting the article based on semantics, or trying to explain what it "really means" to be an expert in tech. The topic of regulating tech is as much about financial management as about algorithms. One needs to understand the costs and revenue streams in detail to devise intelligent regulation. I tend to believe swaths of the tech industry are built on obfuscation of finances and that is where we are losing the expertise in a regulatory context. Look back on past tech booms and note that engineering work was highly financial in nature (rooted in cost benefit analysis). In the software industry it seems like engineering has hardly anything to do with managing costs. Just ship it, they say, and let the "business people" handle the pesky money part.
ajmurmann 6y ago
I think you make an important point that it's about tech literacy. I think the bar is in practice lower. Congress people need to be barely tech literate themselves. They have aids and advisors that should brief them and get them the relevant information for the decision that needs to be made and the questions that need to be asked in hearings.

goatinaboat 6y ago

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech No one was ever literally all-knowing but tech people never used to be as micro-specialist as is common now. In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. In the early days of Google they probably did have guys who really did understand it all. But not any more.

mrmonkeyman 6y ago
They still exist in massive numbers. Jesus. It's not _that_ hard.
ekidd 6y ago
In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. The last time I looked, a good CS curriculum still teaches people how a half-adder circuit works, how to write code in assembly, the basics of UDP and TCP, how to build a web app, and fundamental algorithms and data structures. Additionally, students might do a couple of the following: implement a primitive SQL engine, write a simple compiler, program a robot, add features to a kernel, or study introductory machine learning. These are all common undergraduate electives. You don't need to be polymath to switch from debugging packet dumps to writing CSS. I'm actually a huge fan of good bootcamps, because some people out there will absolutely love coding, and bootcamps give them a chance. But it's perfectly possible to understand computer architecture and networking protocols and React, and a good university CS curriculum should cover many of those topics at an introductory level.
- Izkata 6y ago
  That describes a CS degree heavily biased towards practical application instead of towards theory, like mine was. We only had a couple of the things in your lists. Anything that involves the physical world went in the engineering degrees - we didn't do circuits, assembly, or programming a robot. Likewise networking I think was an elective, as might have been kernels (though I don't recall that one, and didn't take either of those myself). We did talk about kernels in our systems programming course, but the extent of practical work was things like creating our own malloc and creating a simple shell. Web apps were in the ITM courses (Information Technology something), which was where people learned specific practical skills and most people doing CS degrees didn't touch - I took one out of curiosity and it was so absurdly low-skill-level: The first assignment was creating mockups for site, then imagine spending the next few months on just HTML and CSS implementing it. One specific example of the theory-vs-practical-application difference between our CS degrees, we didn't do compilers, we did programming language design. Parsing theory, grammars, and after learning Scheme we used it to implement an interpreter for our own language.
  - ekidd 6y ago
    I feel like I ought to defend the honor of my school's theoreticians. :-) Their CS program had two theory-heavy courses. In the harder of the two, the homework worked out to 10 pages/week of proofs written in LaTeX. Honors students could also take a functional programming course early on, where they usually got to write a metacircular evaluator. The same CS program also had a software engineering course that required a 5-student team to spend half a term building a group project. (Teams were picked by the professor, for that real-world feel.) This usually required a UI, which meant that we got to learn Motif or web programming or something. This has always seemed like a sensible way to organize a CS curriculum: Everyone needs to write proofs, and everyone needs to write code. Then you can throw in kernels or networking as electives.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

I agree, and will add: An expert in any field must also be well connected so they know who to call / ask / refer to when they don’t know how to proceed.

camillomiller 6y ago

Agreed. I would add ability to do effective and applicable research.

sriku 6y ago

The writeup is not so much about the semantics of the words, but more about the fact that there are so many moving parts designed by diverse teams that no one individual (or even team) has a complete enough understanding of the whole that's sufficient to predict it's consequences on society in relation to its values.

mcrad 6y ago
I find it ironic that many are refuting the article based on semantics, or trying to explain what it "really means" to be an expert in tech. The topic of regulating tech is as much about financial management as about algorithms. One needs to understand the costs and revenue streams in detail to devise intelligent regulation. I tend to believe swaths of the tech industry are built on obfuscation of finances and that is where we are losing the expertise in a regulatory context. Look back on past tech booms and note that engineering work was highly financial in nature (rooted in cost benefit analysis). In the software industry it seems like engineering has hardly anything to do with managing costs. Just ship it, they say, and let the "business people" handle the pesky money part.

ajmurmann 6y ago

I think you make an important point that it's about tech literacy. I think the bar is in practice lower. Congress people need to be barely tech literate themselves. They have aids and advisors that should brief them and get them the relevant information for the decision that needs to be made and the questions that need to be asked in hearings.