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Comment by jmartrican | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the PHD in the office, who was hired because of some mathematical related skill they specialize in, is never getting their hands dirty. They are off somewhere looking smart and protecting their allure, while us grunts are keeping the lights on. Broad stereotype here, but it is what I have experienced.

To be very honest, being on Google searching constantly has been the most important skill. In this face paced IT environment, if you stay too long becoming an expert on something, it's replacement is coming right around the corner.... even within the same framework. As I was finally getting a hang off Spring 4 and Spring Boot 1.x, then comes Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2 with their new WebFlux architecture.

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A lot of the awesome I see people smarter than me doing, is not getting bogged down in nitty gritty but instead thinking about how to DTRT. Then, when they do it, the apparent effort is low: you've discounted the french metric tonne of thinking time that led up to it.

Equally, they should get their hands a little dirty. Best is to be a great chef but spend some time with the bottle washers relating to being a dishpig. Nobody really likes Gordon Ramsay as much as the chefs who invest in staff development.

"In this face paced IT environment, if you stay too long becoming an expert on something, it's replacement is coming right around the corner..."

Depends what the value adding function is. I work in a field (essentially CAD) where getting anything done takes years at best and if a technology does not have an estimated lifespan of at least a decade we don't invest in it.

Web stuff is of course starting to spill in.

Excellent point. Even though a lot of things change, there is a lot that remains the same or is done better with previous years of experience. CAD being a great example.

I think the massive amount of churn in the web world is the exception rather than the rule. If you learned C programming 40 years ago it would still be relevant today. Even Android is almost 10 years old now.

If you learned Ada, Modula-2, Pascal, or BASIC, though, it might not be so relevant. COBOL, FORTRAN, Smalltalk, and Perl 5 are somewhat useful, akin to, maybe, jQuery in the web world.

You can use Perl instead of PHP, Python or Ruby. They all have their strengths and weaknesses but overall they are very similar when it comes to usefulness.

I prefer Perl.

Point taken, but I feel all those languages had good runs. Modula-2 might have had less commercial success but still holds some intellectual interest. I sort of got sick of the web treadmill in 2013 as it felt like "learn a new toolkit every 18 months" and am primarily interested in something with longevity in that niche.

JQuery is not a language. Like saying I “cuisine art” to a chef. Riiiiiight.

Sure, but jQuery from ten years ago is still jQuery. What iteration is Angular on now? Its doesn't have the churn that more recent web frameworks have.

Maybe they're doing some analysis ("data science", statistics, etc.) that is important and you just aren't aware of it.

This reminds me of the PHD in the office, who was hired because of some mathematical related skill they specialize in, is never getting their hands dirty.

You know the adage "Work smart not hard"? That's what you get a PhD for.

You're like the hospital janitor complaining that the doctor never wipes the floor. He's just off somewhere "looking smart".

... do you realise how ridiculous this sounds?

Let me say that I get your point of view: I know of the existence of smart and educated people who are lazy, presumptious, have a superiority complex, talk down on everyone and/or are fakes.

Do you understand my point of view though? Are you aware that people exist who are less educated people and who can't grasp that valuable complex things exist which requiring specialized knowledge, and that those less educated people being unaware of the existence of such things automatically and wrongly assume that their specialists are fakes?

The thesis of the article is that most companies are looking for doctors when they actually just run a cleaning service.

This is not a great analogy. "Algorithmic wizardry" and "organizational skills" are two distinct skill sets, and it's perfectly possible to be great at the former but lousy at the latter.

Since we're all throwing around anecdotes, I k ow both PhDs and long-time industry experts - gun to my head, one of them has to solve a problem or I die, I'm gonna choose the industry expert even if it's in the PhD guys field. Academic honours are very over-rated

That is not nearly accurate analogy. Note that doctors in hospital do more then just looking smart.

And know multiple people who are like he described: generally keep aura of looking smart are are good in few selected areas and generally don't really do much work. And they always get absurd amount of benefit of doubt the same way you do here. Meanwhile anyone who criticize them is assumed to be stupid hospital janitor who don't get that they are the ones who do real work.

And know, they do not do "valuable complex things" nobody else cant grasps on the project. They talk about complex things around water cooler to impress people.

And yes I do know people who do complex things too.

Right, so we both know both types. But the person I was responding to either doesn't, or chose to omit one to try and make a point about it.

> That is not nearly accurate analogy. Note that doctors in hospital do more then just looking smart.

That's precesily my point. Doctors in hospital do more than just looking smart, even though janitors may or may not realise it. It's really an excellent analogy.

Pretty much all janitors realize that doctors do work.

Are you guessing, or have you actually asked?

I have been a janitor (or pretty much that) during my MD studies, then I have been a nurse, then a doctor, then a programmer. I didn't know a janitor who thought that nurses or doctors didn't do valuable work (greatly more valuable than their own).

In the IT field it's different though. Every junior is absolutely sure they are better than their team lead (been there, done that, also been the team lead). Every QA thinks that programmers are lazy brats. Every PM too. Every programmer thinks QAs and PMs are stupid and can't grok their (programmers') work (which, so far I think that it's indeed true (maybe not the stupid part, but the 'can't' part), and that's why the industry suffers).

It’s a bigger divide when we go across teams. Most programmers distinctly look down upon sysadmins and as a sysadmin and developer I really have to say that the sheer number of former blue collar workers that became sysadmins compared to developers does not help the perception. But more importantly, a lot of engineers have a sheer disdain for sales as if they don’t work hard and the same goes back even further where engineering students look down often on most liberal arts students (never mind that the liberal arts and business students are the ones that they’ll be working for probably statistically speaking).

Thanks for sharing.

> I didn't know a janitor who thought that nurses or doctors didn't do valuable work (greatly more valuable than their own).

More than once I've heard staff (not janitors though) talking depreciatively about doctors (e.g. "he thinks he knows everything", "he said X but my uncle says Y").

I think if you read what I wrote a bit more charitably you'll see that my point wasn't really about janitors. I used them figuratively to comment on OP's attitude that seemed like the terrible combination that is confidence and ignorance.

I absolutely agree with your comments. I just joined in to give my 2 cents with some real experience and to give more nuance to the discussion. I do agree that medical and IT fields are different (and that's what I tried to explain in my original comment)

> I didn't know a janitor who thought that nurses or doctors didn't do valuable work (greatly more valuable than their own).

Much harder, no doubt. More valuable though… a good portion of that value comes from having a clean hospital to begin with.

(Not that I am not talking about market value, which is obviously much lower than that of doctors, thanks to the larger supply of janitors, and how much cheaper it is to train them.)

Not trying to dismiss your thoughts, but I never met a janitor who believed something like this. They knew perfectly well that they are easily replaceable, that their work is easy etc. It might be because of culture/location of course - Eastern Europe in my case. Also, have in mind that the hospitals I worked in are quite different from what you imagine when you say "a hospital" and especially "a clean hospital" :D. One of the reasons I switched careers and locations.

I agree wholeheartedly with your points. Though I must say I am not talking about the hospital industry, I am talking about IT.... where we developers are the doctors. I also think that these PHD's can add immense value, they are in fact very smart and educated.

I'll tell you one anecdote, when big data was starting to bubble up, there were PHD's that were hired at two firms I worked at. Eventually in the long run big data was done, but it was not from their efforts. It was the grunts.

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