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Ask HN: Trapped by knowledge

22 pointsboulders10 comments

I'm a tech lead for a small group of developers and sysadmins. I often find that even though they are experts in their own domain, I am able to help them to resolve problems in specific areas for which I have little or no knowledge. I find it surprising that they have not arrived upon the solution themselves.

I describe it as being trapped by knowledge. Those that I am helping appear to have passed some magical threshold of knowledge, beyond which they stop asking "stupid" questions, and instead rely only upon what they know. That's where I step in. I ask those stupid questions, or I do a quick Google search, and more often than not I find a solution very quickly. Maybe my team experience the same thing with me, and I just don't recognise it. Or maybe I'm just the sort of person who doesn't mind asking those stupid questions.

Is this a known phenomenon? Has any research been done in this area? I'd be interested to know if anyone else experiences the same thing.

I've had the same thing happen. We had a guy write some JNI code (C shim for Java). It was woeful; didn't even check the return value of getenv(). I don't find out until this thing crashes first deployment in production.

Another example: our Java and QA guys wondered why they couldn't get Jmeter to do Kerberos authentication. I quickly Googled and found that their Jmeter used a version pf Apache's HTTP library which couldn't do Kerberos. They just needed to update.

I'm constantly asked 'quick' questions (unfortunately quick questions tend to have the longer answers).

I ask them dumb questions and ask them to ask dumb questions (why, where, what) but it's taken to be insincere. Perhaps it's just straight fatigue that I find difficult to hide.

I realise I need a new job, even if its giant drop in salary.

I don't think you should be so quick to classify your team members in any way. It's hard to see the answer when you are heads down in something. You lose orientation and a fresh pair of eyes is helpful in those cases.

The issue isn't that they know too much. The more likely difference is that you are an expert at relevant kinds of problem solving and they are not (they might be pretty good, but that's not the same thing). Expertise is not about knowing lots of facts or APIs or whatever.

Chances are you don't even realize you have the relevant skill (there's a thing called "expert blind spot") so you also have hard time articulating what exactly you're doing.

There is in fact quite a lot of research on the subject. Might want to start with "Sources of Power" by Gary Klein, and "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance" (which I haven't read yet but gets cited a lot).

I once worked with a guy that was supposedly a C expert.

One day he was asked to estimate the memory consumption of a new project. He did it by writing a simulator that would fill a data structure with random data. Each data size had a specific probability to be generated. Then he would measure memory used.

Why didn't he simply compute the total size ? That's basic math/CS.

There are stupid people and smart people. Being expert doesn't mean they are smart.

Did you ask him why he took the approach he took?

Yes, and why random data? Possibly he needed 'real' data because the store used compression/RLE.

But certainly they should have got an estimate first - given a probability and size.

He was not using real data because we anticipated that with this new feature, the usage would change. (Making our existing data meaningless).

And there was no compression or anything fancy.

I think he is being realistic and i think he did a good job, you wouldn't write this if you asked him or if you knew things like worst-case, average-case, and best-case performance.

I'm sorry but I can't agree with that unless you provide an explanation of why you need to measure instead of compute.

If you generate N data (N being choosen randomly in a uniform distribution between 100 and 200), and your data size is S (taken randomly between 50 and 500)..

The best, average and worst case scenario are easy enough to compute, aren't they ? Of course there was more than two variables (maybe 5), but it was not that hard.

There's something to be said about people who ask "dumb questions". There are some really great lines about it in the Tim Ferriss/Malcolm Gladwell podcast when Gladwell is talking about how his dad is one of those people that are really great at asking dumb questions.

I think it has something to do with confidence. Confident people don't care too much about being wrong - they are confident in what they know and aren't concerned about being labeled "an idiot."

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