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Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you were just telling the CTO "this is wrong" instead of offering an alternative solution?

If that's the case it's not surprising it didn't sink in. You're just giving him another problem.

> I've spent my career performance tuning, but then how do I explain this to people who think a 60-second timeout is a performance problem best solved by buying another million dollars worth of kit?

I'm surprised you've spent your career doing this and you still haven't figured out how to get people to listen to you.

Making your work legible to others feels as important as the work itself.

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For reference, I did offer alternative solutions.

> I'm surprised you've spent your career doing this and you still haven't figured out how to get people to listen to you.

This is the point of the article, which you appear to have missed.

There's a point where it becomes essentially impossible to articulate the differences to the lay person. Or for that matter, someone actually quite skilled, but not a "master".

It's not a lack of skill on the part of the expert, it's the lack of skill on the part of everybody else.

But is this really the point of the article? The article argues that it is difficult to identify expertise. However, the situation you describe is one where (if I read you correctly) not your expertise was questioned but your recommendation. If there wasn’t any tangible difference between the CTO’s and your suggested course of action on a metric that he as a customer cared about, then maybe his proposal was indeed the better one? And yes, probably he didn’t care about the exact latencies in the system, but he would probably care about customer retention, system availability, etc.?

I'm finding this entire line of discussion incredibly curious because not only does it confirm my original argument and the that of the article, but it hammers the point home.

Everything you've just said is gibberish to a master.

It's like making a straight-faced argument that setting the speed limit to 1 mph on a motorway might make perfect sense, and the traffic engineer is actually at fault for not making it clear that this is nonsense.

I get that you don't see the ridiculousness of 50 microseconds vs 5 milliseconds, but that's the point.

You don't see it, and you start making random arguments untethered from reality.

The fact that you are blind to it, unlike being blind to 1 mph vs 65 mph is the entire point.

You may have driven thousands of hours. You have don't have thousands of hours of network performance tuning expertise.

Both of us wouldn't be able to even begin to understand the complaints Ayrton Senna might make about how the steering is too "crunchy" at the extremes or that the brake strength imbalance is shifting the car about.

There's levels of expertise, and if two people are too far apart, meaningful communication between them becomes impossible.

Really does sound like you have difficulties with communicating your points that do not have to do with external factors, but with your actual skill at communicating. Experts manage to successfully argue fine points to laypersons all the time to non experts in every field. You are coming across as deflective.

He is not deflective. Your comments are rather dense. The orthodoxy of ‘changing frame’ and ‘putting it in a language they understand’ is layman drivel. It is not always possible to do so and it is overwhelmingly untractable if you eskew the fundamental reasons in a discussion with a non-expert that insists on technical justification and just doesn’t take your cookie-cutter time/money/competitive advantage talking points and can’t provide you with specifics that can be quantified.

What real life project only involves experts on specific field? Are you working on toy problems? Isn't there cost/benefit analysis to everything? If I understand something well, I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way. If I can't, then I probably lack full grasp of the topic

> I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way

Ok? But you are required to motivate a decision that is based on terms, conditions, probabilities, consequences that can only be encoded at knowledge-level A. When projected down to knowledge-level C, it sounds like "otherwise bad things might happen".

The jargon is not what matters. The logic of the decision is not meaningful or believable without knowledge of the "physics of the system" at level A.

Most people understand nuclear bombs in layman terms, and they understand them intuitively from watching videos and pictures. Without videos and pictures, no one would care.

Nuclear risk is about the reaction to somebody using a nuclear weapon, not the bomb itself being bad.

'Eschew' is probably the word you want instead of 'eskew'.

It's the job of an expert to communicate their understanding of the world in a way that motivates non experts to make the correct the decision. If an expert isn't successful in this, they need to improve their methods of communication. Everything else is an excuse.

This presumes that the expert shouldn’t be the one making the decision.

Law firms are run by lawyers. The chief of surgery is a surgeon. Architecture firms are run by architects at the top.

Why is it that in IT it is expected that all management of IT is “non technical” to the point of not understanding what they’re hearing from direct reports!?

Would it be normal in your mind for a chemical plant foreman in charge of the process to not know what atoms are!?

If I were to guess, I would say an average 4th grader knows the difference between nano, milli or micro seconds. Understanding the magnitude might not be the problem for the CTO. But why should the CTO care? How does it translate to his business requirements? That's your job to explain, no?

> If I were to guess, I would say an average 4th grader knows the difference between nano, milli or micro seconds.

Have you ever spent any significant time in an environment where most people are not (children of) college graduates? Because this is absurd. The average person who has just finished a year of high school physics probably can’t tell you those.

If I were to guess, your child is attending Palo Alto High School when the next school year begins.

I am in Ethiopia. We use the metric system, maybe I am biased

The person who was talking about this optimization should know that they should provide context.

Do they work for a high frequency trading firm? Do they make a CRUD app which has few users and (as much as I hate that) "they can wait even 5 seconds".

If the person does not give context then they dont explain well..

On a side note: for me the problem seems to be not the speed, but the choke point - just 2 servers (with no redudancy?). What one or both go down?

> There's levels of expertise, and if two people are too far apart, meaningful communication between them becomes impossible.

You've disproved this yourself earlier in this comment. You made an analogy to explain a concept to a non-expert.

It is entirely on you to make yourself understood to non-experts. It is both possible and extremely important.

But again: is the CTO really not able to spot the expertise or is the expert so detached that he can’t translate between the worlds anymore? I find it much easier to believe that the CTO fully understands that he has an expert in front of him who knows what he is talking about but doesn’t see the relevance of the recommendation. My doctor might tell me that I should eat more vegetables and I’m fully convinced of the doctor’s expertise, but I might still not follow the advice

> Everything you've just said is gibberish to a master

That is rather a condescending take: calling yourself a master and calling their words gibberish is hardly thoughtful dialogue. Other parts of your comment are equally bad “ untethered from reality” should not be written. Someone is trying to engage with you and you are dismissing them by using very charged words. Even worse you are demonstrating poor communications skills - that point being questioned elsewhere in the thread. I hope you can learn to listen to others politely even when you disagree, and please try to follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

  Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.

I have been familiar with the author and this article for a long time.

> It's not a lack of skill on the part of the expert, it's the lack of skill on the part of everybody else

This is a very poor frame of reference. It's not other people's fault they cannot understand the value you provide, it's your fault.

The thing that tends to bother engineers is that articulating your value (I.e. sales and marketing) is generally orthogonal to your key competencies.

I see this so often: engineers who think it’s demeaning to explain deeply technical things in business terms, so they refuse. Like it’s somehow noble to only speak one language.

> engineers who think it’s demeaning to explain deeply technical things in business terms, so they refuse

I can, and have, explained 'deeply technical things' in 'business terms'. And people understood. Then made a bad/poor/wrong choice anyway, because... "well... all those things you're saying might happen, they might not. Or... it may not happen for months or years, and we already committed to date X for project Y".

I can tell people the cost of punting on 'deeply technical thing' will be enormous, like... "this will require doubling the dept headcount and stopping all new progress for 6-12 months". Then offer alternatives. Then get summarily ignored, and watch things crash months later, and the dept is then stuck for months scrambling to understand all the problems they could have avoided. The decision maker who decided for extremely short term gain? They're gone (sometimes of their own choosing, sometimes not).

The "risks" can seem wildly out of touch with reality, but many times if you're making poor choices you do hit the "worst case scenario" wall. Colleague has been contracting inside a shop on and off for a few years. He indicated "if we don't do X, we will not be able to do any new feature development for at least 18 months". And... closing in on 4 years later, they've not shipped any substantial new features (some bug fixes, but that's about it).

I've seen this happen once up close, and have seen inside other companies and got the war stories from others.

Does this happen every single time? Of course not. But even if you can confidently and correctly and pleasingly describe deep tech things to business folks in their own language, showing the pros/cons/costs/risks... that doesn't mean they will take your side. Saving face, hitting deadlines at all costs, and other factors weight on decisions, and you can't control that. You can control where and how you work though.

My equivalent of this was finding a brand new SAN array had been formatted wrong. It was nearly empty and unused so it would have been a 5-minute job to format 99% of it and shuffle the in-use 1% around so that the rest can be fixed too.

Both the storage vendor tech and I vehemently argued for solving this immediately but were told to “do it later”.

I pointed out that “later” would be when it is full and has 10K production users using it 24/7. Hence any reformatting would be a six-month project requiring additional kit for the scratch space needed. Not to mention the risk!

I was wrong. It took 12 months.

Yes? The position is not that being a good communicator guarantees perfect results every time.

The position is that intentionally being a bad communicator guarantees poor results most of the time.

Same way that not driving drunk does not guarantee you won’t get in a wreck.

It sounds like you cannot convince them based on merit, because they simply do not understand you and the language you speak. It sounds like you need to change tack, convince them you're an expert in $field without using words and prhases from $field; keep your secrets and knowledge, feed them some generic drivel. Maybe hire someone that can help you with your sales pitch.

I mean who would be convinced by an “expert” who can’t explain to a non-expert?

Yes, maybe I desperately need to frobulize the macrowublitz to avoid pracknation, but I’ll wait for someone who can explain why it’s a high priority to achieve my goals.

Did you read the article? This is the point, selling a good service to people that has no idea is inherently hard

That is very much not the point of the article. The article is very focused on exploring the idea of identifying expertise and only briefly mentions money in the beginning of the piece.

Cedric explicitly directs people to another article which discusses how this idea relates to money: "Bellotti’s observations are worth reading in their entirety, especially if you’re interested in the actionable implications of the idea. But I’d like to take this property of expertise in another direction. Now that we know that expertise is more legible to experts, could we perhaps invert this observation and turn it into a goal by itself? Could you turn this into something that helps you acquire expertise?".

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