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Comment by dochtman | Hacker News Reader

Is this common across the industry, or mostly used at Amazon? I’ve been a professional software engineer for 20 year and read a lot of HN, but I think I haven’t seen this particular acronym around much (I think I would usually call these people “domain experts”).

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The term "SME" is common in engineering. It is equivalent to "domain expert".

Yeah - I’m nowhere near Amazon but I’ve heard it, even been called it more than once. In my experience it’s not a title, so much as a role in a particular context. Like, I could be GM of billing - and therefore in a meeting I might be one of the billing SMEs.

I worked at Nielsen (TV Ratings) 3-4 years ago and we used it all the time and not for tech. At the time it was used by all he major Entertainment Studios in Los Angeles as well. Any type of office role it: Marketing, Mathematician, Software and Data Roles, ...

Never used it at small companies so it seems mostly used at larger companies or relatively new.

This is commonly used in the Hr, accounting, finance, and logistics teams in retail companies I’ve worked at that aren’t Amazon. In my experience it’s not uniquely an engineering term.

Same here, 25 years writing software, never heard it, even working in the Bay Area.

I got a pretty large number of upvotes on the three-word post above so I think the term is common in some circles, unheard of in others. Someone should map it somehow.

Map it somehow? What do you mean? There is a Wikipedia entry on it [1] that is a start.

To your point, maybe there needs to be an HN glossary of terms or something like that.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-matter_expert

I mean map which companies use this SME acronym and which don't, similar to how "soda", "pop", and "coke" map to different regions of the USA.

My hunch is it comes from companies that use PMI project managers. Maybe that maps to older non-tech companies, but I have no proof to back any of that up.

> never heard it, even working in the Bay Area.

I think SME is would be less common in the Bay Area. I tend to associate it's usage with older, less computer tech first, companies.

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