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Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

So many of these postmortems end in "we should have hired an expert". I don't really understand what drives people to not hire experts.

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Experts are expensive. And there's hubris or what I jokingly like to call the maxim of management myopia: "Anything I don't understand must be easy."

> And there's hubris or what I jokingly like to call the maxim of management myopia: "Anything I don't understand must be easy."

So much this.

I know of a case where a company hired a junior java dev for a desktop project and after his second week on the job the manager posted a ticket instructing the newbie to implement a component to receive a video stream from a drone, stitch the video stream into a 3D model, and render the 3D model in real time. "How many days do you need to finish this?"

This is a manager who doesn't understand what they are asking or the complexity involved. I suppose the appropriate response should be that time to completion depends on the accuracy needed of the final 3D model as it's going to take a few months minimum to learn entirely different skill sets, oh and you'll need to include the hardware and compute costs for the storage and rendering time. Also you'll need either a sim card or a physical base station for the drone with an internet link. I..uh...may like trying to solve problems.

"If you think experts are expensive, you should see how much amateurs cost!" or something to that effect.

This needs a t-shirt

* Money.

* Not knowing the difference between ignorance and knowledge.

Most probably both at the same time.

>Not knowing the difference between ignorance and knowledge.

Like the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Hindsight is 20/20 though, people may not realize that the people handling important things aren’t actual experts until the bottom falls out of whatever function the purported expert was managing.

In such a position I would slightly prefer to say “I should have hired an expert” and not “I was not keen enough to know that the person I hired was not actually an expert”

It's a matter of timing. You don't hire a CFO on day 1 b/c you don't need one. On day 2 you start to balance the needs vs the expense. Sometimes you take a risk (intentional or not) a delay a little more than you should. Especially when you need experts in 2 areas and can only afford 1.

Sometimes, we misjudge that risk or get unlucky.

I think your statement is rhetorical, but it is obviously the compensation that experts require along with short term thinking.

You don't know what you don't know

That phrase might just be a fancier version of "We wish we'd known then what we know now."

They didn't need an "expert", just someone who can do basic grade school arithmetic.

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