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Comment by aappleby | Hacker News Reader

No single thing, but in general the gradually declining fraction of people capable of understanding complex systems "from top to bottom" concerns me.

I have seen far too many projects become locally-smart but globally-incoherent due to the gradual dissolution of systemic understanding over time.

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Physicist here. Hire more of us. Grokking complex systems, testing, and communicating our knowledge, are what we do.

Seriously. Did a physics bachelor's and taking a network science course in my master's right now. Also currently looking for a job, and it feels impossible to get people to take me, a generalist who can move up and down the problem stack with ease, seriously. I truly believe what Heinlein said; that specialization is for insects.

This is a puzzle to me, even late in my career. I think one thing is that as a company grows and matures, it gets more organized, and more formal about hiring. This makes it harder to hire misfits such as myself. HR has a hard time passing a misfit's resume along to a hiring manager. But also harder to get rid of us. ;-)

If bigger, more successful companies hire with an eye towards specialization, then the flip side is that there's a reward for workers who specialize. Also, many people like what they're doing, want to get good at it, and do more of it.

This is why, much as I love physics and don't regret studying it, I also won't tell anybody that it's a surefire career path.

“Locally smart but globally incoherent” of a great, pithy way to describe many systems/projects/organisations I’ve worked with.

That is by design. A person with complete knowlege is a liability. Workers should be replacable with minimal disruption. It's also less intellectual property to take with you when you leave.

That's why you don't want one person with top-to-bottom knowledge, but not why you don't want many people with top-to-bottom knowledge.

You don't want many people with top-to-bottom knowledge because those people command higher salaries, and because most jobs don't require top-to-bottom knowledge, meaning those higher salaries wouldn't translate into commensurate value being returned to the company.

Also people with top-to-bottom knowledge will tend to want to be promoted, and most won't (because employment is a pyramid, and also see the Gervais Principle) so you'll be left with a pool of frustrated, overpaid employees.

I think a decent rule of thumb might be to have three people with really deep holistic expertise. If there's so much context that it's hard for people to have and maintain that depth, then the organization is successful enough that it can afford to pay a premium for a few of them. And when one of them moves up or out, you have two more to pass on the knowledge to a new third. Maybe two or four or five would be fine too, but three seems to me like it might be about the optimum. But it's very risky to have either zero or one person who knows a system from top to bottom.

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