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> People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the s
by psadauskas 3y ago
> People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potential target drops off sharply and you would have to increase the price dramatically.
I think, even aside from the incentives, its a matter of interest and time. Earlier in my career, when I was learning at a rapid pace, I also had the time and motivation to write blog posts about what I discovered, as did many of my peers. Its also easier to write about beginner concepts, because they're simpler.
As I've advanced in my career, the things I'm learning and doing are more and more complicated, and/or require much more prerequisite knowledge. Not only do I have less time, there's also a corresponding increase in difficulty in writing concisely and coherently about the more advanced concepts.
About once a week I read a blog post in a field I'm familiar with, and recognize it as something I myself would have written 10 years ago. But I also now see in it the potential problems and pitfalls, and tweaks to make to avoid them. I think to myself "I should write a blog post about that", and sometimes even jot down some notes or a draft, but the topic is just so complicated, and the potential problems so subtle, that it takes a large amount of effort just organizing it, and I get bored/distracted and move on, never finishing it.
Talking to those same peers now, they feel much the same. And even with the experts that do manage to write about expert topics, that's become their full time job. Then after a few years of full-time writing instead of full-time doing, I find when they write about a topic that I've been full-time doing while they were writing, there's gaps in their knowledge or new techniques and tradeoffs they've missed.
I don't know how to solve this problem, except maybe figure out a way to give the knowledgeable experts a sabbatical or something, where they can take a break and write. Good luck getting a startup to agree to that, though.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoThat seems to be why the most popular advanced topics are conference talks instead of books. Still takes prep and you lose the quality of a tome, but an hour long talk (possibly with decently annotated slides for later viewings) is probably better worth for the speakers and audiences alike. conference foots the bill with the costs gathered from participants, participants get a variety of talks (so they aren't paying for one tome but maybe a dozen nuggets to serve as jumping off points. Which may be all an advanced participant needs), and the industry gets advertising/potential recruiting from the staff they dispatch. Of course, I'm sure I don't need to explain the downsides of a talk, Especially one presented by very knowledgable people but not ones who are necessarily expert speakers. But at the same time, that lack of polish may be a light in the darkness that is false platitudes in every other ad.
- xtracto 3y agoI have a similar feeling. I've got quite a bit of experience and battle scars after 25 years in the field. I've got technical knowledge at different levels: from jr to staff/architect level to CTO. However, I've never liked writing. First English is not my first language, so I barely managed to write my PhD thesis in that languages, mainly because I had to. But in general I've tried several times to write some extensive piece about something that I am passionate about at the moment, and although in my head the blog post sounds good, once I start writing, I just get lazy and words don't flow. What has worked for me is mentoring. I am advisor for several startups at different stages. I have weekly 1 hour meetings with their CTOs (sometimes the CEO, depending on the startup). They aske me questions of things they are struggling with, and I give them my POV, ideas and sometimes more questions. So far that has been very nice. People have appreciated it a lot (I've even been referred as advisor to new founders) and in addition I usually "charge" 0.5-1% equity instead of money, which is a good way to have some stake in projects I like.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]