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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

I remember having a whiteboard conversation with an Enterprise IT architect. I drew my usual diagram of the actual systems and services and how they connect. He rubbed out all the arrows, drew a triangle and had all the arrows flowing into and out of the triangle.

"What's the triangle?" I (perhaps naively) asked.

"That's the source of ontological truth".

That's when I realised there's a whole other level of ability that some people have. This guy was a zen master of bullshit.

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I find it particularly true when I work with americans. this is because technical careers pay six digits in the USA. a sizeable part of the people that ended up in the technical field without really the right background or career just think they can do it because they got a degree from something "technical" that is not CS or even are so sure of themselves that they think they can do it even if they don't know how to. basically using salesmen training and candoit into the technical world. In europe that would never happen because people consider technical positions and knowledge below management skills and the crooks would end up into the mgmt positions because it pays better to be a PM than a tech guy. it is changing but slowly.

In Europe there's plenty of people with CS-related degree and decades of experience, which stuck in 1980-2000s with their solution and organization design skills and thus slowly becoming generally incompetent. It is not only American feature.

On the other hand, the physicists, mechanical and electrical engineers I've worked with have been almost universally better engineers than the CS grads, with little or no formal CS training.

My experience has been different. The backgrounds of the best engineers that I’ve worked with has been extremely varied: CS, History, Physics, Economics, Psychology, EE, etc..

However, one of the most frustrating colleagues has been a former Chemical Engineer. In 15 years, he has only implemented new technologies when absolutely forced to by people higher in org chart, even when the need is beyond obvious. He fought against 64-bit computing, hypervisor virtualization, automated config management, privileged account management, SaaS apps, and IaaS cloud platforms.

So, I don’t think that you can determine whether someone is a good engineer solely based on their background. I just try to stay away from the people who want to change everything and the people who want to change nothing.

Maybe he tried to make the point that he wanted the discussion on a less detailed level?

The funny thing is that at the physical layer, it's more or less true. With things like F5 even more so.

What does it even mean for the arrows to flow _into_ the source of ontological truth? That's possibly an amazing compliment!

steel-manning for fun: if its a master data governance tool then you could use it to load all systems master data and also extract all master data from those systems and reconcile it to ensure all rules are being followed. you may even use this info to trigger masterdata workflows..

there are so many bozos faking this precicley because a surface glance doesnt necicarily tell you they are full of shit.

A key indicator is do they dig into code?, do they look at data bases?, do they mock stuff up and prototype? do they reference company strategy and financial targets?.. they cant just talk the talk, they also have to walk the walk.

If someone said this to me then showed me a prototype integrated masterdata and business intellignence solution, how it would interface with busines governance, change management etc. i would be happy.. if they just had that triangle and wanted someone else to "do the technical stuff" then its another story :)

Or a cheeky way of looking at it.. does involving this person normally make things more or less clear? does the time to get value from work reduce or increase?

Yep, there is a lot of BS in EA.

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