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It sounds like you were just telling the CTO "this is wrong" instead of offering an alternative solution? If that's the case it's not surprising it didn't sink

It sounds like you were just telling the CTO "this is wrong" instead of offering an alternative solution? If that's the case it's not surprising it didn't sink in. You're just giving him another problem. > I've spent my career performance tuning, but then how do I explain this to people who think a 60-second timeout is a performance problem best solved by buying another million dollars worth of kit? I'm surprised you've spent your career doing this and you still haven't figured out how to get people to listen to you. Making your work legible to others feels as important as the work itself.

jiggawatts 3y ago
For reference, I did offer alternative solutions. > I'm surprised you've spent your career doing this and you still haven't figured out how to get people to listen to you. This is the point of the article, which you appear to have missed. There's a point where it becomes essentially impossible to articulate the differences to the lay person. Or for that matter, someone actually quite skilled, but not a "master". It's not a lack of skill on the part of the expert, it's the lack of skill on the part of everybody else.
- thesumofall 3y ago
  But is this really the point of the article? The article argues that it is difficult to identify expertise. However, the situation you describe is one where (if I read you correctly) not your expertise was questioned but your recommendation. If there wasn’t any tangible difference between the CTO’s and your suggested course of action on a metric that he as a customer cared about, then maybe his proposal was indeed the better one? And yes, probably he didn’t care about the exact latencies in the system, but he would probably care about customer retention, system availability, etc.?
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    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 that this is nonsense. I get that you don't see the ridiculousness of 50 microseconds vs 5 milliseconds, but that's the point. You don't see it, and you start making random arguments untethered from reality. The fact that you are blind to it, unlike being blind to 1 mph vs 65 mph is the entire point. You may have driven thousands of hours. You have don't have thousands of hours of network performance tuning expertise. Both of us wouldn't be able to even begin to understand the complaints Ayrton Senna might make about how the steering is too "crunchy" at the extremes or that the brake strength imbalance is shifting the car about. There's levels of expertise, and if two people are too far apart, meaningful communication between them becomes impossible.
    - ryanklee 3y ago
      Really does sound like you have difficulties with communicating your points that do not have to do with external factors, but with your actual skill at communicating. Experts manage to successfully argue fine points to laypersons all the time to non experts in every field. You are coming across as deflective.
      - bazooka 3y ago
        He is not deflective. Your comments are rather dense. The orthodoxy of ‘changing frame’ and ‘putting it in a language they understand’ is layman drivel. It is not always possible to do so and it is overwhelmingly untractable if you eskew the fundamental reasons in a discussion with a non-expert that insists on technical justification and just doesn’t take your cookie-cutter time/money/competitive advantage talking points and can’t provide you with specifics that can be quantified.
        yohannesk 3y ago
        What real life project only involves experts on specific field? Are you working on toy problems? Isn't there cost/benefit analysis to everything? If I understand something well, I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way. If I can't, then I probably lack full grasp of the topic
        yobbo 3y ago
        > I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way Ok? But you are required to motivate a decision that is based on terms, conditions, probabilities, consequences that can only be encoded at knowledge-level A. When projected down to knowledge-level C, it sounds like "otherwise bad things might happen". The jargon is not what matters. The logic of the decision is not meaningful or believable without knowledge of the "physics of the system" at level A. Most people understand nuclear bombs in layman terms, and they understand them intuitively from watching videos and pictures. Without videos and pictures, no one would care.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  I have been familiar with the author and this article for a long time. > It's not a lack of skill on the part of the expert, it's the lack of skill on the part of everybody else This is a very poor frame of reference. It's not other people's fault they cannot understand the value you provide, it's your fault. The thing that tends to bother engineers is that articulating your value (I.e. sales and marketing) is generally orthogonal to your key competencies.
  - brookst 3y ago
    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.
    - mgkimsal 3y ago
      > 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". I can tell people the cost of punting on 'deeply technical thing' will be enormous, like... "this will require doubling the dept headcount and stopping all new progress for 6-12 months". Then offer alternatives. Then get summarily ignored, and watch things crash months later, and the dept is then stuck for months scrambling to understand all the problems they could have avoided. The decision maker who decided for extremely short term gain? They're gone (sometimes of their own choosing, sometimes not). The "risks" can seem wildly out of touch with reality, but many times if you're making poor choices you do hit the "worst case scenario" wall. Colleague has been contracting inside a shop on and off for a few years. He indicated "if we don't do X, we will not be able to do any new feature development for at least 18 months". And... closing in on 4 years later, they've not shipped any substantial new features (some bug fixes, but that's about it). I've seen this happen once up close, and have seen inside other companies and got the war stories from others. Does this happen every single time? Of course not. But even if you can confidently and correctly and pleasingly describe deep tech things to business folks in their own language, showing the pros/cons/costs/risks... that doesn't mean they will take your side. Saving face, hitting deadlines at all costs, and other factors weight on decisions, and you can't control that. You can control where and how you work though.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  It sounds like you cannot convince them based on merit, because they simply do not understand you and the language you speak. It sounds like you need to change tack, convince them you're an expert in $field without using words and prhases from $field; keep your secrets and knowledge, feed them some generic drivel. Maybe hire someone that can help you with your sales pitch.
  - brookst 3y ago
    I mean who would be convinced by an “expert” who can’t explain to a non-expert? Yes, maybe I desperately need to frobulize the macrowublitz to avoid pracknation, but I’ll wait for someone who can explain why it’s a high priority to achieve my goals.
yard2010 3y ago
Did you read the article? This is the point, selling a good service to people that has no idea is inherently hard
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  That is very much not the point of the article. The article is very focused on exploring the idea of identifying expertise and only briefly mentions money in the beginning of the piece. Cedric explicitly directs people to another article which discusses how this idea relates to money: "Bellotti’s observations are worth reading in their entirety, especially if you’re interested in the actionable implications of the idea. But I’d like to take this property of expertise in another direction. Now that we know that expertise is more legible to experts, could we perhaps invert this observation and turn it into a goal by itself? Could you turn this into something that helps you acquire expertise?".

jiggawatts 3y ago

For reference, I did offer alternative solutions. > I'm surprised you've spent your career doing this and you still haven't figured out how to get people to listen to you. This is the point of the article, which you appear to have missed. There's a point where it becomes essentially impossible to articulate the differences to the lay person. Or for that matter, someone actually quite skilled, but not a "master". It's not a lack of skill on the part of the expert, it's the lack of skill on the part of everybody else.

thesumofall 3y ago
But is this really the point of the article? The article argues that it is difficult to identify expertise. However, the situation you describe is one where (if I read you correctly) not your expertise was questioned but your recommendation. If there wasn’t any tangible difference between the CTO’s and your suggested course of action on a metric that he as a customer cared about, then maybe his proposal was indeed the better one? And yes, probably he didn’t care about the exact latencies in the system, but he would probably care about customer retention, system availability, etc.?
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  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 that this is nonsense. I get that you don't see the ridiculousness of 50 microseconds vs 5 milliseconds, but that's the point. You don't see it, and you start making random arguments untethered from reality. The fact that you are blind to it, unlike being blind to 1 mph vs 65 mph is the entire point. You may have driven thousands of hours. You have don't have thousands of hours of network performance tuning expertise. Both of us wouldn't be able to even begin to understand the complaints Ayrton Senna might make about how the steering is too "crunchy" at the extremes or that the brake strength imbalance is shifting the car about. There's levels of expertise, and if two people are too far apart, meaningful communication between them becomes impossible.
  - ryanklee 3y ago
    Really does sound like you have difficulties with communicating your points that do not have to do with external factors, but with your actual skill at communicating. Experts manage to successfully argue fine points to laypersons all the time to non experts in every field. You are coming across as deflective.
    - bazooka 3y ago
      He is not deflective. Your comments are rather dense. The orthodoxy of ‘changing frame’ and ‘putting it in a language they understand’ is layman drivel. It is not always possible to do so and it is overwhelmingly untractable if you eskew the fundamental reasons in a discussion with a non-expert that insists on technical justification and just doesn’t take your cookie-cutter time/money/competitive advantage talking points and can’t provide you with specifics that can be quantified.
      - yohannesk 3y ago
        What real life project only involves experts on specific field? Are you working on toy problems? Isn't there cost/benefit analysis to everything? If I understand something well, I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way. If I can't, then I probably lack full grasp of the topic
        yobbo 3y ago
        > I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way Ok? But you are required to motivate a decision that is based on terms, conditions, probabilities, consequences that can only be encoded at knowledge-level A. When projected down to knowledge-level C, it sounds like "otherwise bad things might happen". The jargon is not what matters. The logic of the decision is not meaningful or believable without knowledge of the "physics of the system" at level A. Most people understand nuclear bombs in layman terms, and they understand them intuitively from watching videos and pictures. Without videos and pictures, no one would care.
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
I have been familiar with the author and this article for a long time. > It's not a lack of skill on the part of the expert, it's the lack of skill on the part of everybody else This is a very poor frame of reference. It's not other people's fault they cannot understand the value you provide, it's your fault. The thing that tends to bother engineers is that articulating your value (I.e. sales and marketing) is generally orthogonal to your key competencies.
- brookst 3y ago
  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.
  - mgkimsal 3y ago
    > 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". I can tell people the cost of punting on 'deeply technical thing' will be enormous, like... "this will require doubling the dept headcount and stopping all new progress for 6-12 months". Then offer alternatives. Then get summarily ignored, and watch things crash months later, and the dept is then stuck for months scrambling to understand all the problems they could have avoided. The decision maker who decided for extremely short term gain? They're gone (sometimes of their own choosing, sometimes not). The "risks" can seem wildly out of touch with reality, but many times if you're making poor choices you do hit the "worst case scenario" wall. Colleague has been contracting inside a shop on and off for a few years. He indicated "if we don't do X, we will not be able to do any new feature development for at least 18 months". And... closing in on 4 years later, they've not shipped any substantial new features (some bug fixes, but that's about it). I've seen this happen once up close, and have seen inside other companies and got the war stories from others. Does this happen every single time? Of course not. But even if you can confidently and correctly and pleasingly describe deep tech things to business folks in their own language, showing the pros/cons/costs/risks... that doesn't mean they will take your side. Saving face, hitting deadlines at all costs, and other factors weight on decisions, and you can't control that. You can control where and how you work though.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
It sounds like you cannot convince them based on merit, because they simply do not understand you and the language you speak. It sounds like you need to change tack, convince them you're an expert in $field without using words and prhases from $field; keep your secrets and knowledge, feed them some generic drivel. Maybe hire someone that can help you with your sales pitch.
- brookst 3y ago
  I mean who would be convinced by an “expert” who can’t explain to a non-expert? Yes, maybe I desperately need to frobulize the macrowublitz to avoid pracknation, but I’ll wait for someone who can explain why it’s a high priority to achieve my goals.

yard2010 3y ago

Did you read the article? This is the point, selling a good service to people that has no idea is inherently hard

ZephyrBlu 3y ago
That is very much not the point of the article. The article is very focused on exploring the idea of identifying expertise and only briefly mentions money in the beginning of the piece. Cedric explicitly directs people to another article which discusses how this idea relates to money: "Bellotti’s observations are worth reading in their entirety, especially if you’re interested in the actionable implications of the idea. But I’d like to take this property of expertise in another direction. Now that we know that expertise is more legible to experts, could we perhaps invert this observation and turn it into a goal by itself? Could you turn this into something that helps you acquire expertise?".